On The Hanged Man
I’m spinning round and around in a playpark five minutes from my house. I’m on an old roundabout, you know the ones made from wood with big slatted skirts and a ledge around the bottom to push off from. I lie with my back flat against the panels, my head skimming and knocking the hard center bulb, hands clenched around the cold bars, holding on for dear life. A boy from along the road is pushing (his tongue is probably out to the side) the scuffing of his trainer against the concrete becoming harder, my heart becoming faster. Eyes to the sky. The clouds orbit the trees blur the shrieks and squeals from across at the swings they twist and turn and turn and turn until they spin off and silence. And then there’s just me. Me and the big blue sky. I don’t care if they don’t know where I am. Yet something else is here that feels familiar. Way up in the blueness. A tug inside. A voice that isn’t mine. My invisible umbilical cord.
****
They have different meanings when they’re reversed - she shuffled and spread them neatly into a crescent before me.
What, like opposite meanings? I asked
Not necessarily. More like inverted meanings.
I turn the first card. A serene looking man with a halo round his head and beads of aquamarine around his neck, suspended from a tree.
That’s a card no one ever wants to get, she said her sky-blue eyes pulsing into me. Not you though. For you, this card is perfect.
****
Years later I’ll sit in a circle with strangers, sage settling into the air. All of us with the same bits and bobs: yoga mats and refillable water bottles, journals and eye masks. Some will wear multicoloured trousers, most will be tattooed. Wandering eyes finding anchors in the smiles of strangers. Others sink down into fingers that fidget with toggles on drawstrings. The fair headed lady with the generous smile at the front of the room will say “they have a beautiful way of showing us exactly where we need to go”. And three hours later I’ll be lying on my yoga mat staring into styrofoam ceiling panels, the sides of my cheeks damp with tears and a heart that swells in the wisdom that’s been awakened in me, that whispers in me, ghostly and red.
***
The squeals from the swings tornado back from the distance and they fall down upon me and my ears fill up and my body slips and bumps against the wooden panels and the boy runs off to kick a ball and my slippery fingers slide on the metal and the roundabout slows and my head spins and I wait for a few moments to come back to myself. Back to the park, and the lane at the top that I’ll soon walk through to get to the street that my house sits on, where her arms will be waiting, as they always are.