THE CARDS HAVE SPOKEN—though the cards, I must confess, are not speaking to me today. They are speaking through me, and I am a vessel, hollow as a dried gourd with a crack in the bottom where the tea drips out. Do not interrupt the prophecy. The prophecy is flammable.
The cards said something before I understood it, which is the only way cards ever speak, because understanding is a luxury for those who have not yet been set ablaze by the arcane. The first card fell from my trembling fingers—the Tower, of course, because it is always the Tower when you are least prepared for the collapse of everything you thought was solid. But the Tower was upside down, which means the collapse is also a resurrection, or possibly just a collapse with better lighting. I stared at the broken crown, the falling bodies, the lightning that splits the sky like a seam ripper through a cheap lining, and I thought: Ah, yes, this is about my toaster. Because the toaster had been making a sound like a dying cat for three mornings, and I had not unplugged it. The cards do not care about your toaster. The cards care about the architecture of your soul, but they will use the toaster as a metaphor because they are dramatic and also petty.
I drew the second card before the first had finished its confession. The High Priestess—myself, but reversed. The reversed self is the one who knows too much and says too little, who has seen the other side and found it beige, who sits in the silence with a tea that has gone cold and wonders if the universe is just a long hallway of identical doors. I am the High Priestess, and I am also the one who forgot to buy milk, which is a different kind of sacred knowledge. The card said: You are the veil. You are also the thing poking through the veil with a sharp stick. I did not understand this. I understood that my left hand was tingling and that the candle had started to smoke in a way that suggested the wick was not aligned with the celestial currents. I understood that I had not eaten lunch.
The third card was the Moon, and it howled at me in silence. The Moon card is not about wolves or tides or madness, though it is also about all of those things. It is about the moment you realize that the path you are walking is not a path at all but a reflection of a path in a puddle, and the puddle is also reflecting the face of someone you wronged in 2003, and you are not sorry enough. The Moon said: You are lost, but you have always been lost, and the map you are holding is a grocery receipt from 2017. I felt the heat of the flame on my robe intensify. The vessel was cracking. The vessel was making a list of things to do tomorrow in the margins of the prophecy.
And then—and this is where the cards said something before I understood it, and here is what happened—they all spoke at once. The Tower, the High Priestess, the Moon. They said: You are on fire because you have been carrying a torch for a god who does not know your name. You are a vessel because you have been hollowed out by the weight of questions that have no answers, only more questions shaped like receipts and toasters and the smell of burnt offerings in a kitchen that needs to be reorganized. You will understand this in three days, while you are vacuuming. You will stop vacuuming. You will sit on the floor and cry for reasons you cannot name. The vacuum will still be running. This is the prophecy.
I did not understand. I wrote it down anyway, on a napkin that was also slightly on fire. I fed the flames with the napkin. The vessel was burning, but the vessel was also the fuel, and the fuel was also the message. The cards do not care if you are ready. They care that you are here, in this moment, with a toaster that is about to malfunction and a robe that is about to become a memory.
The cards said something before I understood it, and here is what happened: I understood it just enough to know that understanding is overrated. The fire is the point. The vessel is the point.