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Premonitions always come true in hindsight
When I was 10 years old a wise friend looked into my palms and said that there was a deep fork engraved in the folds of my skin. It etched across my cupped hands, one line heading up between my right fingers, another line jutting towards the cliff of my outer palm. It means you’ll have a really big decision to make one day, she said, hopefully you make the right one.
I worried excessively about that premonition. What would the divergency in my life be? Would I know when it was deciding time or would it be a series of mini decisions along the way? Would I be equipped to make the right call or would I flounder and spend the rest of my life paying the price, dangling from the edges of my own palm?
I pondered my future more than the average tween. I see myself at 14 in my bedroom, the walls a shade of fiberglass pink that my mother picked out. Michelle Branch lyrics, “tears form being my eyes/ but I do not cry/ counting the days that pass me by,” flow from my gold stereo on repeat. I’m pinching my hip in search of muffin tops. I’m reading Cosmo Girl for tips on how to hide the budding red bumps on my chin that only I seem to have. I’m closing my eyes and creating screenplays of the future dates I’ll go on. How sophisticated I’ll be. The beaded butterfly shaped tops from Charlotte Russe that I’ll bear. Dreaming of my future often clashed with my present. I’d turn down parking lot hangouts to sit alone in my bedroom on Friday nights, my imagination the only company I needed. I pictured the future so vehemently—the body I’d flaunt, the men I’d love, the potentials of being a writer in New York or a flight attendant or a doctor’s wife.
In my mid 20s, imagining the future felt like staring into a concrete wall. I wanted more. I needed to be someone other than the person I’d been in high school. Different from the woman I’d made myself to be in college. I couldn’t picture a life without my mediocre boyfriend. The girls I’d lived with for years, who seemed to understand me better than I understood myself. I couldn’t see the world beyond the city where I spent my college years. I don’t feel the same nostalgia for that version of myself, though I do miss her body and her clothes. I wish she’d had the confidence to appreciate them more and carve her own path without fear of choosing the wrong one.
When you look back on the years leading up to the present, you notice a pattern.
My pattern is this. I’m a runner. Not the athletic type who wakes up before an 8 hour work day to exercise. I’m the type who flees to a new city to avoid a conversation. The type who plots to move to a different continent and only tells people once the plane ticket isn’t refundable.
When I first moved to Madrid I’d have these primal feelings of being immensely far from home. I’d walk down the street amidst lovers and friends eating tapas and shouting and I’d think, I actually did this. I’d look at the moon and picture my friends in California looking at the sun. In my mind’s eye I could picture two points on a map, one on the Pacific Coast and another piercing through the heart of Spain. A small string connecting the two pins. I could walk along the tightrope back home if I ever wanted to. But I didn’t. I could feel the fork in my palm growing deeper, as if I’d broken the rules of my own fate in some way.
My therapist might say that running is a way to avoid getting too close to people. I hate hurting people more than I hate hurting myself. But maybe not all patterns are meant to be broken. Perhaps it’s a compulsion to keep me awake. A primitive instinct to keep going forward. To shed the skin. To grow a brighter tail. To forge your own way instead of worrying how your path looks to somebody else.
I don’t see the future as picturesquely as I did in my childhood bedroom. Nor does it look like a dull gray slab of cement. When I look into the folds of my hands now, I notice more lines etching out from the main crease. The many crossroads in this life. The routes I didn’t take. The ones I did. I can picture my lives on those other paths. I see myself in California with a Pilates body and a green tea in a manicured hand. I see myself with circles under my eyes and a child sleeping in the back seat of the car; I’m driving north. I’m wading out into the pacific and trying to hide my thighs. I’m not sure if I’m as happy, but I’m living. I’m there. I’m still me in my truest form—the person I am deep inside.
I’m not sure if I’ve reached that big fork yet. I’ve surpassed two major decisions in my life thus far and there's no doubt in my mind that I took the right path. If ever I find myself on that other path, the ominous one reaching out towards the abyss, I’m sure I can find a detour. Maybe that friend was right all along, though only time will tell.
Premonitions always come true in hindsight.