Star Aligner, Fate Decider

I met with a soothsayer. She told me she would read my fortune for half her regular price, as my aura had enticed her. She told me she had never met anyone who carried themselves as I do. I figured she said the same thing to anyone she found attractive and took it simply as a compliment and a nice bargain. I picked a card. She told me outright that it was an ill omen. I picked another. She told me that it would involve connections with other people. I picked a third one. She paused for a long while and told me that our meeting was itself a curse, and that something horrible would happen now that I had met with her. We both stared at each other dead in the eyes for a long while after this, blankly, as though we were silently resigning ourselves with our fates and breathing in the poison in the air regardless. The weight of it had sunk into us. She told me not to meet her here ever again. I nodded. She balled her hand into a first, still sitting out on the table, wrought with something I wasn’t perceptive enough to decipher. She told me to leave. I nodded.

I wasn’t one to believe in the idea of fates or fortunes or soothsaying, but the encounter had shaken me almost to my core. I wondered if it was a good thing I hadn’t bothered to think about those things up until I met with her on some momentary whim. I wondered if fate had turned up its nose at the sight of me. I stood outside her cramped little edifice and stared at the ground for a long time. I just stood there. I considered reaching into my pocket and lighting up a smoke. Ultimately I didn’t. The idea of the curse had leached into me completely - I felt like anything I could do besides stand there could spring forth some other misfortune or curse. I took a walk through a nearby night market to clear my head. The sounds and smells alone were enough to leave me momentarily forgetful of it all. I bought some food from a vendor even though I wasn’t particularly hungry. It was good. Maybe I wasn’t so misfortunate after all.

I met with a soothsayer. Her heavy breath poured into my ears. We met again by sheer chance, out visiting the same bar on the same night weeks later. The moment we saw each other, we recognized each other. And the moment we recognized each other, the poison set in again. We let it carry us. It carried us all the way here, hopelessly pressed up against one another, having met again as intimately as we could possibly meet. It was no calamity. In fact, we both seemed to enjoy ourselves a lot. She cuddled up against me, breath still gently heaving, and told me that my fortune hadn’t come true yet. Brazenly I asked if she wanted to continue keeping an eye on me until it did. She laughed, more surprised than entertained, and agreed. We exchanged contacts. She told me she was consistently surprised by me. I tried to take it as a compliment, but the expectation had already started to weigh down on me as well.

I sent her a picture later the next day of a plush toy I had won from a crane game while on a break from work. She told me she wasn’t expecting me to contact her so soon. At that point I figured I should just read everything she says to me in a surprised tone of voice from then on. She told me the plush toy was cute and asked me how I got it. I told her that I challenged myself to play a crane game without looking until I won something. She asked me how many tries it took. I told her twelve. I was just as surprised in the moment as she was with her response.

I took it that she was fond enough of me to enjoy receiving pictures like that. It fueled my want to do more things in a similar vein. I was fond of her too. We met again in person a few days later. We went to a local park and walked around, talking and pointing at flowers. We went and got a well-made, comfortable meal. We admired subtleties of life together. She told me she hadn’t known anyone she could talk like this with in perhaps her entire life. I told her I hadn’t met anyone who had received my talking like this so well. She laughed and stared at me. The poison was invisible now, the latent curse we had built around ourselves almost imperceptible.

I met with a soothsayer. She read my fortune again, this time at midday. Her edifice, cramped as it was, felt like the world had been shut out and turned dark against its will as she sat across from each other and she laid out the cards. She told me to pick. She divined me again. She told me that this time, a transformative change would occur to me and it would have nothing to do with her. Instead, I would arrive at some significant realization one day soon while nothing of import was going on. A sadness blanketed her eyes. I asked her if she was upset that our fates were no longer intertwined with this new fortune. She sat there, staring past me, for minutes. She told me that my first fortune was the first time she was so wrong about one. She cried quietly, covered her face, and answered me with a timid, shaky "yes".

I spent the next few days before we met again wondering what her presence in my life meant to me. I thought about the relationship we had built on such dubious circumstances and how quickly it became more. I suspected that she saw me as some sort of miraculous figure that removed her from mundanity and brought something new into her life. I viewed her as someone who gave me the time of day enough to listen and listen well, and that was enough for me. I wondered if she really did have any divine powers, and if her being so torn up about her failure over me was proof of that. I wondered if fate had lied to me and twisted me around in a whimsical circle. No answers came to me that day.

I met with a soothsayer. I noticed her eyes first, as usual. I fell into them immediately and thought nothing of it. We reclined on the riverbank and she seemed tranquil, almost at peace with what was to come of us. I felt that nothing was going to change; she merely hoped as much. I don’t think there was anything I could’ve done to assuage her doubts any further.

I bought a deck of tarot cards on the way home from work one day on yet another whim. I looked up how to do divinations and decided to try to do my own. I laid all the cards out and drew them in a particular order. The cards told me that nothing important would happen, but that an ill omen still weighed over my head. It left me feeling empty for lack of a soothsayer. I wondered if she would have considered this an accurate prescience.

I met with a stray cat on the riverbank. I knelt down to pet it and it rolled over, willing to entertain me. It had a soft orange pelt. It spoke to me then and told me that I would meet with my fate if I ever left the soothsayer. I told the cat that I would make no such guarantees. It asked me how it was that I lived, by what code I made my decisions. I looked over at the river to attempt to gather my thoughts, but nothing accumulated. I simply told it that I let my decisions decide themselves and that I held onto nothing beyond the flow of day into night into day again. It laughed at me snidely and sauntered away.

I saw the soothsayer slumped over against an alley wall nearby her edifice one day. She looked tired, caked in distress. I asked her what was wrong. She looked up at me and, even then, light entered her eyes. She told me that she was in dire financial straits and that it was wracking her body with stress. I told her that I could help and asked if she still had access to her edifice and everything in it. She told me that it was all okay and that she would accept my help. She didn’t sound like she was holding anything in. I guessed that she was too tired to cry and brought her to my place to rest. I walked outside and lit up a smoke. I was scared of how worried I found myself at the sight of her. She stirred something in me when she leaned against that wall, crestfallen. I decided that it was the activation point of the curse I had been considering since we first met. I wished it would affect someone other than her instead. I could learn to live through a poison, I thought, but I couldn’t bear this.

The stray cat approached me as I finished off my cigarette and snuffed it out underfoot. It smiled at me wryly and told me that the world was a grand function of will and predilection. It told me that my misplacements of those two things were my greatest failings. I couldn’t bring myself to bend down and pet it. I just shrugged it off. It warned me again that if I wanted to stop the fear in my heart then I would have to live as everyone else and attempt to shift fate with my presence. It told me that my presence was too strong for my force to be so weak, and that the only thing I could do in my current state was be weathered. I told it to mind its own business. I went back in to see her.

I met with a soothsayer sleeping deep on my bed, haphazardly half-slipped under the covers. I lent her all my energy, my strength, my will, my fate, my presence. I gave her my poison and my curse, and she bore it all magnificently. I sat down in front of my desk across the room and half-remembered how to do a tarot reading. I decided to divine her fortune. I spread the cards out before her sleeping eyes and asked her to pick some. I paused for a little while, making sure her breathing was steady. I checked if mine was steady as well. I picked a card. It told me that she would experience a great boon. I picked another card. It told me that it would last a long time. I picked yet another. It told me that it would have something to do with her profession. I looked at her again and decided that, if only for her, fate surely existed and ran its course without fail.