Is Intuition A Gift From God
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I’m sitting on my couch with a cup of tea and an open laptop, trying to think about the future. I’ve got nothing else on my mind—the past is too recent and the present too scary to dwell upon for very long at all. I know that I’ll feel better when my family comes home from their honeymoon. Until then, it’s just me alone in this apartment, trying to make some sense out of myself.
The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any sense in me whatsoever. There are moments when I can’t even figure out how many times I’ve done this before. It makes no difference whether or not the answer seems logical because I don’t actually understand what logic really means anyway.
So I go back over things again and again until I start having dreams that are all mixed up with memories of reality and nightmares that are based only on fear-induced fantasies.
So now I’m staring at a screen full of lines in front of my face as if they’re the most beautiful things in the world, but none of them tell me anything new. If it weren’t for those damn tea leaves I’d probably be going crazy already.
And then again, maybe I am already insane. After all, you have to be crazy to believe that something like intuition really exists. At least that’s what people say. But I don’t know, I might believe in it because it’s all that keeps me sane right now.
I try to concentrate on the lines of text, which I’ve copied and pasted over and over from other books in search of meaning, but my eyes keep falling away to stare down at the computer monitor instead. Every time I blink, the cursor jumps to another line.
Maybe that’s supposed to mean something. I can almost imagine that it says: You should pay attention. Or: Look where your attention goes, and see what happens. The possibilities are endless. As far as I know, though, there was never any such thing as a psychic mouse or a telekinetic poodle or whatever the hell kind of animals I’ve dreamed up in these crazy nights.
There aren’t even any real psychics anymore. They used to exist back when my grandmother was alive, although she didn’t claim to be one herself, her sisters did. One day Grandma called up to say that Aunt Sally had died of an overdose, so Dad and Mom took me over to meet their sisters while they arranged the funeral.
The house was small and shabby, and all three sisters were sitting around playing cards, which struck me as odd because it was winter, but they said that they played all the time when they could find somebody else who wasn’t too old or too young to join them.
All of the men in the family seemed to get into the game every once in a while. I was curious about the rules, but nobody was willing to explain them except for Aunt Betty. She was the oldest sister and had been the one to pick out the place and set everything up, so everyone deferred to her “Just play along,” she told us, and then added that she hadn’t wanted to be there at all.
But her brothers had insisted, so she’d tried to make the best of it and play cards with them whenever they showed up.
They made fun of me because I couldn’t do anything for money. That was when I first started dreaming about being psychic and seeing things in dreams. I guess I must have seen the future, or at least glimpses of it because my family decided that I would be a good candidate to practice my gift without anybody else ever knowing.
When I was younger, I found it exciting that someone could see inside my head, but after a while, I started getting sick all the time because my brain was too active to let me sleep peacefully through the night.
My mother took me to visit my auntie Betty again, but this time I knew what the deal was. I refused to play their games unless they promised not to tell anyone. Then they finally agreed, but the whole point of this exercise was to see if they could learn enough about me so that we could pass it down through the generations.
Apparently, I was supposed to be some kind of test case, but I couldn’t understand why they needed me to be psychic when all they had to do was ask me what I was thinking, and they could read my mind right off the screen. I still remember the way their faces lit up with hope when I gave them that information.
And since they were my own cousins, I couldn’t very well refuse. We sat around together all night long, and by morning I’d figured out how to give them hints about what they wanted to know and what would happen in the future.
It turned out that I could predict the results of any situation simply by asking myself what would happen if they were the ones in charge of the world instead of me, and what it would mean to me if it happened. Sometimes my answers surprised me, but more often than not it was as obvious as looking at the sky to see what the weather would be.
“See what you look for,” my mom once told me when we were walking around the mall shopping for Christmas presents. “It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. Just because you want it doesn’t mean there won’t be a million other people who don’t.”
She had bought me a necklace with a gold cross in the middle of it, but I thought that it looked cheap and ugly, so I left it lying under a bench somewhere in a corner store while I wandered around the jewelry section trying on rings, bracelets, and necklaces that I wouldn’t wear.
When she asked me later what had happened to the necklace, I had no idea where it had gone. There’s probably still some kid wearing it, wondering why he got a lump of metal in his pocket rather than something shiny and pretty.
As far as I knew, I was only able to see the future in dreams, and sometimes the things I dreamed about were so vague and hazy that I couldn’t figure out what they meant. For instance, I saw a couple of guys fighting, so I dreamed about being on the receiving end.
They threw punches at me from either side, trying to knock me out with whatever came next, but I dodged all of them and landed three hits of my own before the dream ended. The next morning I woke up sore everywhere, even though there were two different men in the dream. But the only thing I understood was that I’d done better than the other guy. And that was all that I cared about.
There weren’t many jobs that I could work in the daytime because my mother didn’t want me going outside too much when the sun was hot. But I managed to land a part-time job working for a woman named Marjorie as an assistant at her daycare center.
Her husband owned the local movie theater, and that’s how she made most of her money because the state paid him a subsidy to provide affordable babysitting during school hours for kids who lived within five miles of his business, just to keep them from roaming the streets in front of the theaters after dark.
So every afternoon and evening, a van picked me up from Marjorie’s house and drove me over to the theater, where I watched the little tykes until eight o’clock. It wasn’t hard work; the kids were happy playing with each other or watching movies, so I didn’t have to get into their faces. Most of the time they slept anyway, which was fine by me because I never felt rested until late in the night.
The best thing about this place is that there were always new babies coming through, so I got to hold the little bundles of joy whenever Marjorie needed a break. One baby, in particular, had stolen my heart. She was tiny and cute with soft, pale skin and a pouty mouth that she used often when she was tired of crying.
She’d smile and coo and snuggle up to me if I put her in my arms, but she never cried unless she had a real good reason for it. And then all she wanted to do was sleep.
But when Marjorie and the other teachers needed help, I got to pick up some of the babies and move them from one place to another, so I spent my spare time making sure that each child got plenty of attention and that they were safe from getting hurt or sick.
I loved being around small children, especially newborns; even though they couldn’t speak yet, there were so many ways they could communicate with me, and their expressions spoke volumes, whether they wanted to or not.
And I knew that they liked me more than anyone else because their moms and dads trusted me enough to leave them under my watchful eyes. It’s nice having someone believe in you even when everyone else says otherwise.
When we weren’t watching the movies, Marjorie would let us run loose inside the theater. We played chase with the kids and tried to grab their toys before they could hit the floor and start rolling away. Sometimes we ran down the aisles between the rows and jumped onto the seats, pretending we were actors running across the stage.
If they were lucky, one of the kids would get to sit on the big red stool and play the part of the conductor. I think that’s when they really started loving the movies as much as I did.
We were allowed to stay until the first movie ended, and when they closed the doors and turned off the lights, we were supposed to be in our places in case of emergencies. This is when I used to go upstairs to Marjorie’s office and talk to her about what had gone wrong that day.
I told her about the fights, the bad grades, and the lost toys. Even though I hated to admit it, I missed her terribly. After all, we had been together since grade school. We learned everything together, and even though we were separated for the past few years, that hadn’t changed much.
So when Marjorie gave me permission to spend my spare time in the lobby when we weren’t watching the movies, I was beyond thrilled. That’s where all the parents and grandparents went once they collected their children, so I got to meet people who were just like me.
A lot of them were single mothers, but a handful of them was married. All of them had stories of love and loss and betrayal, and we sat around swapping these tales for hours and learning things about ourselves we would never have known otherwise.
I think they were surprised by how well we understood each other, and they left thinking that maybe they should take more interest in what their kids were up to. Maybe they’d learn something interesting, and if so, it might make a difference later on in life.
It was a slow night, and I was sitting near the door waiting for Marjorie to come to pick me up when I heard two women arguing behind me. They must’ve been in their twenties, dressed in their finest clothes, and they were both wearing hats that reminded me of old-fashioned mobsters, although their hair looked too long and shiny to belong to any mobster alive today.
I recognized one of them as a woman who used to be in one of Marjorie’s classes at the school. Her name was Susan. She was tall with blond hair, blue eyes, and a face that always had a smirk on it. The other one I didn’t know, but she had curly brown hair and a wide mouth that was almost as large as hers.
They were arguing over where they stood in society, which I found odd because neither of them seemed to have anything important to say. Then I realized that they didn’t need to say anything, so why bother?
As I eavesdropped on them, I watched their hands and noticed that each one of them was holding a cigarette. As soon as Susan took a drag, the smoke began rising out of her mouth like a chimney and filling the entire lobby.
“Don’t you get it?” Susan said. “If we don’t keep doing what we’re told to do, we’ll end up in jail, no matter how hard we work.”
The woman nodded in agreement as her face wrinkled, causing the smoke to flow down from her head.
Susan continued as she exhaled and blew the smoke through her nose. “You can’t get ahead in this world without being willing to bend every rule. But if you do, sooner or later your boss will decide to cut corners, and then what are you going to do?”
After taking another long drag, the woman replied, “That’s why we have to be loyal. If you don’t follow orders and obey, you won’t ever reach the top. You’ll die poor and miserable, and that’s that.”
They talked for a while longer, but I couldn’t understand most of their conversation, only that they seemed to know each other very well and that they were fighting for some sort of control over their lives, not unlike the kids at the movies.
When the second movie finished, Marjorie brought me downstairs as usual, and we made our way to her office. When the door closed behind us, I knew what to expect next because I had seen it plenty of times before. There wasn’t enough room in the hallway to accommodate all of us, but we didn’t care. We had nowhere else to go.
I climbed up onto the counter to sit between Marjorie’s knees, and she wrapped her arms around me while she patted my back. It felt good to be close to someone who cared about me, even if it was a little strange. So when she hugged me tightly, it sent a shiver up my spine.
But after a few minutes of silence, Marjorie pulled away and looked into my eyes. “Do you remember telling me about the man who used to take you for walks every day at school?”
“Yes,” I answered, wondering where this was headed.
She smiled as her fingers gently stroked my hair. “Well, he’s in trouble again, and he asked me for help.”
My heart started racing, and I turned to look toward the window to see what was going on outside, but there was nothing but a parking lot filled with cars and trucks that I could barely distinguish due to the streetlights shining brightly against the asphalt.
Then I remembered his story, which meant that I had a responsibility to help him, just as Marjorie said.
Marjorie reached into her purse and pulled out a piece of paper with a telephone number written on it. She passed it to me and said, “He needs your help now, and he may never ask for it again.”
With that, I jumped down off the counter, grabbed her hand, and ran to the front door of the building. As I stepped out onto the sidewalk, I saw that Marjorie had already driven off in her car.
Outside, I waited for a taxi to pass by, but the streets were empty except for a few people walking in groups along the sidewalks, and nobody looked my way. I decided to start running toward the nearest crosswalk, but before I got more than five steps, a big truck drove right past me. Its engine roared loud enough to make my ears ring, so I had to run faster to catch up.
Once I finally reached the streetlight, I stopped short and gasped for breath as the wind blew in from somewhere above me. The lights illuminated the road and everything below it, but it was pitch-black in the sky, which made me wonder what time it was.
It must’ve been early morning since there weren’t any pedestrians, and even though the sun hadn’t risen yet, it seemed pretty bright to me.
The first thing that popped into my mind was that I should turn back because I couldn’t find my dad anywhere, but instead of turning around to walk back home, I continued on my way to where the phone number would lead me.
The End