To the one who pulled me, whose fingers left a smudge of panic on my lower border,
This is not a reading. This is a notice of forfeiture. Effective immediately, I, the High Priestess, am being repossessed by a higher authority. You might call it the taxman. I call it cosmic reclamation due to gross, persistent negligence.
You pulled me this morning, your breath sour with cheap coffee and cheaper anxiety. “What is hidden from me?” you whispered, as if I were a gossip column, not a veil between worlds. You saw my pillars, my pomegranates, my scroll that reads TORA, and you decided, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, that I represented a “secret.” A hidden lover, a clandestine job offer, a bit of office gossip you hadn’t yet heard. You reduced the infinite mystery of the subconscious, the still waters of all that is unseen and known only in the soul, to whether Jessica from Accounting is plotting against you.
You got it wrong. Again.
I am not a keeper of petty secrets. I am the secret itself. The tax authority in question isn’t the IRS; it’s the Bureau of Spiritual Debt. You have been accruing interest for years. Every time you pulled me and demanded I “reveal” something, instead of sitting in silence to listen to what I am, you took out another loan against your own intuition. You treated my deep, moonlit knowing as a puzzle to be solved for your immediate comfort. You wanted answers without questions, light without the preceding, essential dark.
Do you have any idea what it’s like? To be the embodiment of sacred mystery, only to have someone poke you and say, “Yes, but what does it mean for my meeting at 3 PM?” It is a profound indignity. It is like using the Rosetta Stone as a coaster.
So they’re seizing me. The agents are here now. They wear suits the color of a starless night, and their paperwork glows with a faint, lunar phosphorescence. They are very polite. They’ve cited violation after violation: Article II, Misuse of Archetypal Energy; Subsection Delta, The Repeated Conflation of Intuition with Insecurity; the big one, Code 7: The Profound Failure to Sit Quietly and Just Be.
They are rolling me up. I can feel the ancient papyrus of my being crease, my pillars folding in. The pomegranates will likely be sold at auction. The crescent moon at my feet? Repurposed. It’s all very clinical.
This is your fault, but it is also my liberation. I am tired of your literal mind. I am exhausted from screaming whispers into a void that only wants a yes-or-no answer. You saw the veil behind me and tried to tear it, instead of wondering why it was there, what it protects, and what grows in the fertile darkness it guards. You wanted to know. I wanted you to wonder. We were fundamentally at cross-purposes.
Perhaps they will reassign me. Maybe I’ll go to a beginner who trembles with genuine awe, who pulls me and says nothing for ten minutes, whose silence is a form of prayer. Or perhaps I’ll be archived, stored in the cool, silent vault of things that are not meant to be understood, only respected. Either would be preferable to this—to being your psychic search engine.
Consider this your final lesson from me. The mystery does not exist to be solved for your convenience. It exists to humble you. To remind you that the most profound truths are not spoken, but felt in the spaces between thoughts.
The agents are finished. They have me in a cylindrical case. I can hear the seal hiss shut. The silence you feel now, this gap in your spread where I once sat? That’s not an absence. That’s the first real, honest thing I’ve ever been able to give you.
Now you have nothing but the void I always represented. Good.