The Pisces(11)
“I left my children with a friend and rented a hotel room, where I could go self-harm in peace,” she said. “But then I got scared I would off myself. I didn’t know what else to do. So I’ve come back to this bloody hellhole.”
Unlike Brianne and Chickenhorse, Claire was firmly instructed that she should not be dating until she’d done some work on herself. She called this “a load of shite.”
“Lucy, I’d like to suggest the same for you,” said Dr. Jude. “No dating, no sex, no contact with Jamie for the next ninety days. You’ll likely experience a period of withdrawal, if you haven’t begun to already. But it will be worth it in the end.”
“Withdrawal?”
“Yes, you’re detoxing from him…from a whole way of life really. A life defined by the pursuit of others to complete you.”
“What does withdrawal entail?”
“People in withdrawal describe symptoms of depression, despair, insomnia, a feeling of emptiness.”
“Oh, so just life,” I said.
“Other symptoms can include nausea, anxiety, irrational thoughts, and even cognitive distortions.”
“Great, more to look forward to.”
“One more thing. You mentioned spending money on psychics, astrologers, love potions. I would urge you to abandon these pursuits, as they only prolong your inability to find intimacy with yourself. And that’s the real treasure here.”
“Ah,” I said. “Can’t wait for that.”
8.
There was one place on Abbot Kinney that gave me solace, and that was the Mystic Journeys bookstore. I looked in the window and saw the rows of rose quartz crystals. I knew from Googling that rose quartz was said to bring love. Actually, it seemed like most crystals brought something that you wanted. If crystals really did what they said they did, there would probably be no problems in the world. Everyone would have everything they desired, and all would be peaceful, or at least, all the people who sold crystals would be rich, famous, and well-loved. They probably wouldn’t be selling crystals anymore, because they wouldn’t have to. Still, I liked to believe that magic was real. I had to go in.
I wasn’t really a hippie, per se. But having grown up with Annika as an older sister, I could get down with the New Age vibes. She followed the Grateful Dead around in college and would send me little items that she bought in the parking lot: Nag Champa incense, a malachite pendulum necklace, a blue glass talisman to keep the evil eye away. Annika had been the only maternal figure in my life since my mother died when I was eleven—totemic maternal and from a distance, but all I had—so I always found New Age culture comforting. This store with its cabinets and shelves of crystals and minerals—amethyst, rose quartz, smoky quartz, pyrite, onyx, apophyllite, rock salt, aqua aura—definitely made magic seem real. The air smelled of sandalwood and amber. You could buy enlightenment from a range of Eastern texts: the Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. You could buy healing in a white jasmine pillar candle or protection in a black votive. Capitalist magic.
I’d owned enough New Age tchotchkes in my lifetime to know that within a few days of purchase they just seemed like more crap. But as you were shopping, sifting through the stones and their meanings, there was hope that this was a turning point. It was the velocity of buying something that was the high, the potentiality of it. I could capitalist-believe in magic. In the store was hope, and hope was what separated me from the flat expanse of the rest of my life. It was like a line, a gateway that stopped me from being swallowed.
I looked at the fliers for all of the different healers. Some did numerology, others Tarot, others Reiki and chakra cleansing. I could have sat there all day and had my fortune told until someone predicted what I wanted to hear—that I was getting back together with Jamie, that he was coming back to me—so I quickly pulled away. I looked at the crystals. I would have loved to buy rose quartz, giant hunks of it, hundreds and hundreds of dollars’ worth. I wanted to make a circle around me; do some ritual shit with rose petals; burn vanilla, gardenia, and strawberry incense to attract love. Instead I bought a sparkly raw chunk of amethyst in the palest purple, which was said to bring peace and stability.
There was also a table where magic candles were sold: red for love and passion, green for money. I bypassed the love candle and selected an egg-colored one for clearing and needed change. Maybe I could just burn the past year away.
* * *
—
At home I ate pad thai and drank white wine, fed Dominic, and gave him his medicine. I’d known nothing about dogs before him—how or where to pet them—but he was patient with me, and I’d soon discovered his favorite places to be touched. His entire head was brown with the exception of two white patches: one a white stripe down the center of his forehead, which I stroked gently with one finger and called his angel mark, and the other a diamond shape on the back of his neck, an arrow pointing as if to say, Scratch me here. This was the area that he could not reach with his paws, and, when scratched, would lull him right to sleep. We would play a game where he gazed at me lovingly, trying to keep his brown eyes open, his lids growing heavy, then popping open, then heavier and heavier until they were sealed shut: just two stitches lined with little lashes.
When he rolled over onto his back and showed me his white underside, it meant that it was time for a belly rub. Sometimes I would get crazy like I was waxing a car, Dominic pawing joyfully at the air, fur flying, tongue out, and panting. Other times I would gently stroke and kiss the softness there, relishing his scent, which was somehow reminiscent of a warm roast chicken.