3

She pulled the hangman card for my future, the third card in a series of 3. The Goddess, something for the second and the Hangman for the third. It was fitting, all three were fitting. The past, being as I was nurtured, I was loved. I felt loved and I was in love. The second (God knows I wish I could remember the second) was also fitting. It had all to do with change, the present moment, change. Getting out of the comfortable and into change. And the Hangman, the third card, to hang around, to wait patiently. It is fitting I tell you, very very fitting for my future. Make no choices, make no moves, just sit with the moment and let it marinate. Let the future path be arranged by the universe and then walk it.

I’m now in a new spot, far away from my place of the past 7 years, the apartment I have lived in on and off since 2005. One I will most likely never return to again. I had tried to buy it at one point on two different occasions. Once from my parents, not knowing they struck a deal with the new owner of the business, who was eventually going to buy the building. And once with the new owner. My requests denied, and so it goes, I was not supposed to own it.

I’m now far far away, cross town in an almost perfectly straight line from where I used to lay my head. I must be 3 or 4 miles away, far far away. My new place is small, I am renting a room from a friend. A 2-bedroom apartment, each room with its own bath. A room large enough to fit everything I need, the walls blank like that of which the apartment looked the first time I was asked to move a year back. The walls here plaster, I do not see myself hanging much, masonry bits and anchors and all. Maybe a picture of my daughter, I think that will be the best picture I hang, maybe the only one.

I can hear the tv going in the front room, the only room aside from the kitchen. I’m a loner tonight tho, like most all my nights, and sitting on the couch watching tv with my new roommate doesn’t exactly fit me, at least not tonight. The fog has lifted some, the weeks leading up to moving were heavy for me, I was leaving my home. This would be the 3rd time in my life I have felt this, leaving my home. Once when I moved to San Luis 25 years ago, when I left my garage. The second when I divorced, we had 2 homes together, but my family was my true home, and now the third, my apartment – that apartment. The third, the hangman.

Patiently waiting.

I would like to burn incense here but it’s such a pungent smell I wouldn’t want to trouble my roommate. I would like to hang a bike on my wall, not needing to get one out of the van every time I want to ride around town. I would like to have an overnight guest... on second thought no I wouldn’t. You know I’ve managed to almost cut it all out. The sex without connection, compulsive buying from Amazon, new bike parts on a whim, ice cream every other night of the week, obsessive flirting with every text I send. I’ve whittled and whittled most all the fillers out of my life. Constantly striving for the higher self, that God consciousness, that connection to where having less is giving me more. It’s as much a struggle at times as it is to keep up with the buying and sexting and mainlining sugar for that high. But when I settle into where I am and what I am working towards, it blossoms into a simplicity. It grows when I stop watering it.

I don’t know how long I will be here for, most the summer I would guess. I don’t know what’s next. Maybe I’ll fall in love and never leave, maybe I’ll go to Texas for a bit, maybe I’ll take another trip, maybe I’ll get hit by a truck in two days’ time and die. What’s to come has never been my business, only what is now, and for now, I’ll just hang around.