Something there is not

There is something I did not tell you.

Did I mention to you I once have a shaman friend? She read my palms and said there are so many broken life lines, and that I had died before once, everything in my life gone. I said true. Must be the time I was marooned at Green Meadows and friends would come to take more of my remains. I could not recall the so many other deaths, the little deaths that come with every loss I make, with every slap in the face that I take. 

And men they all will leave you, she said. 

Now that really hurt. I would like to think that I have very good male friends, only I did not want them in my life, never needed them, and so I made them leave, they did not leave out of their own volition.

Yes, you made them leave, they could not take you, she said. 

How we had a good laugh at that, and I had a moment of what it was like to be in a witch coven, big ladle held in my witch’s hand, a black vat a-boil, men drowning in their fates, as I stir, stir, the way I feel when I am with you sharing a laugh about stories you concocted of men grumbling in the kitchen, hauling in the grocery bag, while you work at your table, in your women’s room. 

Stories that hurt the ones that we otherwise would not let go, if only they loved us well enough.


My mother was no shaman, but she it was who first said that to me. She looked at my palms, maybe I was ten, soon after my father died, or eighteen, a few years before we would find out she had cervical cancer, three months to go. She said my palm looks like hers, the lines are separate, it is better that I became a nun and did not marry, I will just suffer, like she did with my father. I did not promise anything. Then, as now, I perhaps had wanted to be loved, did not want her life, the lines that she found. I must have wanted to be better than the very best that she wished for me. Aren’t all daughters like that? They all want to do better than Mother.

This shaman I knew, she also said to me, Your friends, they will bar you. I fell stumped. By then that had become a recurrent theme in my life: a shipwreck of plans, dreams gone to naught, precisely why I was there, before her, palms laid open, at her seer eyes’ fine mercy.

She did not tell me whether over the long haul my friends will succeed to obliterate me or I will overthrow.