There was a time, a week or two I should say the card eluded me. I was intuitively chasing it. At the time I had sculpted the perfect man in mind. The replacement. The ONE or at least the next one.

Everyone was asleep at the apartment. My roommate locked me out of our room, which meant I slept on the couch tonight. It didn’t bother me so much. I wanted to stay in the living room all night tonight. It seemed right.

I shuffled the deck of cards three times and spread them out facedown on the coffee table. My fingertips glided across the backs of the sprawled cards trying to feel for the Ace of Hearts.
The idea for this came to me after a session with Moses. We analyzed the faces and body language of the each of the Kings, Queens and Jacks.
“What do you think about the Jack of Diamonds?”
“Trust fund baby. Obviously,” I said.
“Look at the Queen of Diamonds,” he said, “she’s holding her flower like she doesn’t care.”
“Nothing is ever good enough for her.”
“Yeah, and look at the King. Killing himself to make her happy.”
“The Suicide king.”
If I could intuit the Ace of hearts successfully, then I can strengthen my conjuring powers. Shit if Moses can part the seas I should at least be able to pick the Ace of hearts from a lousy deck of cards.
“Which one of these suits is me, do you think?” I asked him.
“Queen of Spades.”
“Which one do you think is you?”
He didn’t answer.
The first card I was drawn to was the Ace of sevens. I tried two more times and neither card was the one. I went to sleep and decided to try again tomorrow night. Maybe if I took a hit it would loosen me up.
The One. I could conjure up the one. He was already sculpted in my mind. If I could do this I can bring him to me. Fuck finding him. I’ll turn myself into the sun and pull him. I’ll create an urge to travel all the way from wherever to Santa Cruz. His friends will think he’s crazy. His Family would be worried, leaving everything like this to travel to a place he’s never been to and for what? They’ll all make him stay. But the pull would be overwhelming. He would get restless. He would know something was waiting for him here…
The experiment failed yet again. The pot didn’t help. And I kept seeing cards everywhere on the street. Walking down Chestnut, I found a card on the driveway of one of the Victorians. It was the Joker. I felt like someone was taunting me.
This went on for a week. I would try to manifest in the evening and then find cards all over the place the next day.

I decided to stop. I gave up on the idea and considered the whole experiment a complete failure. That Friday, I went to Saturn café, the only vegan restaurant in town. I always ordered the fries because anything else would make me sick. The diner had an “everything and anything eccentric goes” theme too.
Scooting into the booth, I turned to my left and there it was. Taped to the wall, the A of <3’s. Staring me in the face.
“I couldn’t believe,” I told Nick. “It was waiting for me there the whole time.” I pulled the card from my bag and showed it to him. “Can you believe it?”
“So, you lost the card and found it at the Saturn?”
“No. I didn’t loose it, it found me.” I explained.
“I don’t get it,” he said and threw his hands up in confusion.

We both stared at view from Mr. Tooley’s Coffeeshop for a while. The gulls were swooping in and attacking each other at the lagoon just right of our view. We sat there quitley for some time.

I turned to looked at him and thought, this is why we’re not fucking.

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