Coming of Age: My Fortune Teller Experience

My Cuban family nicknamed me witch when I was younger, and it stuck. Maybe subconsciously, I embraced the unusual term of endearment and grew up to become an actual witch. Seriously, I am obsessed with all things supernatural to the extent of receiving tarot cards in care packages from family members, and my best friend gifting me an Ouija board for my birthday. As much as I can go on rambling about my cool gadgets, and how my friends and I swear we communicated with our guardian angels via a homemade Ouija board in our High School locker room, I have to focus on what’s important here—a day that changed my life. This was a day that I gave into my deepest temptation, went against my parent’s advice, and visited a fortune teller. Although the supernatural world is enigmatic and intriguing to almost any moderately thoughtful person, I learned on that day that matters of the future should be left up to chance.

When I turned 18, I finally had a car and did not have to ask my parents’ permission for anything. I begged my friend to send me the phone number of a fortune teller she knew, and visited frequently. I promptly went to Coin Star to empty out a huge jar of coins I had saved up, and gave her a call. She gave me her address and told me to go to her house for a palm, card, and numerology reading the next day.

Out of the entire street of plain cookie cutter houses, I pull up to the driveway of the only house on the block that was completely surrounded by a thick layer of trees, and a wooden fence covering the entire perimeter. The house was not visible from the driveway, so the house number was spray painted in red on the wooden fence—a four foot “6436”. The fence was closed shut by a thick iron chain. I called her to let her know I was there, and in a couple of minutes, a hand with long and pointy red nails appeared at the top of fence and proceeded to unravel the chain. That was the exact moment that I realized I should have maybe gone with a friend. Once the fence opened, I walked in and gave her a kiss on the cheek, as is customary in Miami. She appeared to be about eighty years old, and was wearing a silk plum kimono, and had a silver braid that went all the way down to her hips. Maybe it was part of an act—to look like the cliché fortune teller you see in movies, but there she stood looking like she had potions and a crystal ball inside her house.

I followed her inside her cluttered house and into a small back room. Every inch of space on the shelves surrounding the room was covered with tiny dolls and other random knick-knacks. In the center of the room was a circular table with a delicate lace table cloth, and two antique chairs. There was a deck of tarot cards, a purple stone, and a yellow scratch pad on the table. We both sat down and she began to lay out the deck of cards, and I anxiously waited to see what she had to say about my future. As she laid out the first couple of cards, she looked at me with a benevolent smile, and told me that I was going to meet a guy in the near future. As she kept on laying out the cards, she became more and more excited and surprised, even putting her hands on her head in disbelief.

As she grew more excited by this, so did I. Needless to say, I demanded to know more. I asked tons of questions about him and she went as far as describing his appearance in detail. She went into specifics, like what hair and eye color he has, how tall he is, and what year in college he’s in. The only thing she couldn’t tell me was when and how I was going to meet him. Great. She spent what seemed like another thirty minutes talking about him, said her last words, and finally dismissed me. I knew that visiting her was something I had done for fun and nothing else, so I was not going to take anything she told me seriously.

What I was not prepared for was that my life did change without me wanting it to, and beyond my control. No matter how much I tell myself that what she said was not important, it is still in the back of my mind as I have not yet met this “perfect man.” What I did learn though was the value of patience—being able to wait and see how life unfolds, instead of taking an easy way out that can mentally block you and end up confusing you even more. Because the truth is, no one on earth can tell you how the future will turn out. The past and the future are not at all important because they are essentially mental constructs, and all we really have is the present. So really my point is not to discourage people from visiting a fortune teller, but rather to remind them to take that natural human interest in the supernatural with a grain of salt, and live in the moment which is the only reality we know for certain.