The First Time I Visited a Psychic Was Also the Last Time I Visited a Psychic

Once upon a time, I believed in psychics. I believed in Tarot cards and Ouija boards. I was confident there were special people in the world who could communicate with the other side.

Beetlejuice was my favourite movie.

“Oh, Lindsay,” my mom would sigh when I began talking of such things. “Of course it’s real, but anyone trying to make money off fortune telling is full of shit. People with true powers wouldn’t be so stupid to go public with it,” she’d say.

My mom has always been full of insightful tips such as this.

Looking back, I see her point. At 18, however, I was having none of it. I was sure I’d get the answers I so desperately needed, all for the low low price of $50.00/hour.

It’s big news when a psychic moves into your small town, and that’s how I learned of Belinda. I was working at KFC, and a coworker was telling me about her tarot card reading while we smoked Export A cigarettes behind the dumpsters in the back alley.

“It was amazing! She KNEW that I had a bad breakup last year,” Amber told me as I stubbed out my smoke on the pavement.

“She actually knew about the breakup?” I asked, amazed.

“Well, she said, ‘I sense there has been heartache in your recent past.’ And that was enough for me. It’s not like I go around telling just anyone about that!”

Amber told me how Belinda was kind and empathetic to her situation — telling her she was better off without him and her “true love” was yet to come into her life.

I had just been through a rough breakup and reckoned I could use some spiritual guidance as well. I asked Amber for Belinda’s contact information and immediately called to make an appointment. I didn’t bother telling Mom my plans as I already knew what her reaction would be.

The psychic’s home was in one of the many cottages that lined Main Street, across from our town’s sizable marina. I approached the front door, and just as my curled fist was about to make contact, I noticed a sign sticking out of the front step’s flowerpot saying, “Please use the back door.”

It’s a strange sensation to shuffle around a stranger’s house trying to locate their secondary door, but knowing Belinda was a psychic made the experience all the worse.

What was she doing in her little hovel right now? Was she communicating with the dead? Gazing into her crystal ball, watching me apologetically look for this mythical back door she claimed to have?

The backyard was overgrown with weeds and untrimmed trees. This gave me weary hiccups in my brain because I have a deeply ingrained belief that people who don’t keep nice yards are not to be trusted.

This comes from having a professional-grade gardener for a mother.

I knocked on the door. I knocked on the door again.

I checked my watch. Ten minutes early — a fine timeframe to arrive for an appointment.

I was just about to knock again when the interior door swung open, and a thin woman in a long flowing dress appeared before me. Her hair was tied back in a braid, and she looked to be about 30.

Wait what? She was 30?

This seemed wrong. Wasn’t there some sort of minimum age requirement for such things? I was thinking 70 years old. 70 years seemed like an appropriate amount of life lived to be able to adequately sift through the shitshow that was my inner psyche.

“Ah, you’re early,” she said, as though this was a prophecy.

“Oh, sorry, I’m usually early to everything,” I replied.

Belinda led me into her home. A TV was playing in the background, but I couldn’t figure out where the noise was coming from. I didn’t see a living room from my indiscreet glances but did hear the distinct sound of Bart Simpson’s voice ringing through the walls.

We walked through the kitchen, and I noted that the place was a pigsty. It seemed weird that she wanted clients to come through her back door, forcing them to walk past her horrendous living quarters.

There was nothing mystical about this place!

Dirty dishes were piled in the sink. A litterbox brimming with clumpy cat scat sat in the corner of the small room. What kind of person places a litterbox in the same space they cook their food in?

Surely a woman of the mystic world would know how unhygienic that was.

As we moved down a darkened hallway, I began thinking about making a run for it. Maybe this was all a big mistake. Perhaps this woman was crazy and had a hoard of hopeful spiritualists tied up in her attic right now.

Then I noticed the beaded curtain at the end of the hallway.

Okay. Now we were getting somewhere.

The room was dimly lit with candles and soft lighting. Throw rugs were strategically placed on the already carpeted floors. A slouchy couch, so low to the ground it may as well have been a pile of blankets, lined the far wall while a large square pillow sat on the opposite side of the glass coffee table. Incense smokestacks drifted to the ceiling in several corners of the room.

“Have a seat on the couch,” Belinda ordered. She then got down to business.

She handed me a set of Tarot cards and advised me to move them around in my hands so the cards could get to know me. Then, because it is challenging to have cards in your hands without shuffling them, I began to riffle and bridge the deck while also focusing on all the questions I needed answering at that time in my life.

The riffle and bridge shuffle, I soon learned, was a no-no when handling Tarot cards.

She was impressed with my technique, though.

If you’ve ever felt awkward holding hands with your manicurist for an hour while she paints your nails, you would have hated my session with Belinda.

After reading my cards, she asked to hold my hands while she gazed deeply into my eyes. It was difficult enough not to think about Turd Mountain in her kitchen, but making deep and meaningful eye contact with a total stranger is and always has been my Achilles heel.

My only weakness — eye contact.

After an hour of reading me, Belinda came to these conclusions about my life:

I will never get back together with the guy I recently broke up with.

My greatest fear is disappointing people. I apologize too much.

I will find great love once I move away from my hometown.

I will give birth to three boys but not until later in life.

I walked out of Belinda’s that day, not disappointed but perplexed. There I was, working a stupid cashier job at some chicken factory like a sucker when I could be pretending to know how to read gullible people’s futures and making a cool 50 bones an hour from it.

Like always, my mom was right.

For the record, I married the guy I had recently broken up with a few years after my session with Belinda. We had kids young, and it was one boy and one girl.

She was right about one thing. My greatest fear is disappointing people. And that’s why I willingly paid Belinda after my session and thanked her profusely for such a wonderful experience.

Then I turned around and bad-mouthed her business all over town — I have a sneaking suspicion that she didn't see that one coming.