Tarot Sunday on the Dog Beach

On the first warm day in March,

I leave my cowboy boots in your car and

you and I walk together down to the shoreline of Lake Erie.

We’re talking, as we must, about recent plagues –

viruses old and new,

the ever-present trauma of loving men;

you’re trying to finish your degree and somehow also stay sober,

I’m trying to finish a book and somehow also stay comparatively sane.

We’re both so fucking broke.

You know the kind, right?

The selling-plasma, sorry-I-can’t-come,

considering-going-back-to-stripping kind of broke.

God, it’s been a heavy winter, I’m thinking as we talk,

the heaviest.

Our friends have lost jobs. Overdosed. Struggled to obtain abortion care.

Struggled to raise children.

Struggled to reparent themselves.

Become homeless, underwent horrible divorces,

died.

The spectre of nearby pain is always breathing into our hair, and

we are pushed further into war, and

we have been reduced to a shambling stagger,

to nights spent crying as quietly as possible on cold tile floors.

Because of this, it seems important to be here with you today,

two scrappy girls holding hands

in a scrappy city on the water.

The cards for this moment are easy,

rising quietly and lethally from the deck.

The Devil. The Three of Swords.

The Tower.

Vice, addiction, heartbreak,

death, riotous and traumatic upheaval. I’ve been shuffling

and re-dealing all winter, and the same thing happens. This moment

is just fucking bleak.

But here, miraculously, is an easy,

merciful Sunday

where we can rest, if only for a moment.

The sun is out and my bare feet sink into the earth and tramp

against the shale, and you and I are holding hands

all the way down to the lake.

It’s all the seasons at once on the narrow path.

Here is the sharp crush of jewel-toned dead leaves;

then snow, the cold harsh against my tender soles,

not having been barefoot since warmer months. And here,

the mud between my toes, cold but heating up quickly under spring rays,

troubling the deep earth for new life. Here

is the sand, a rough and delirious pleasure,

costing nothing but presence.

The cards for today are easy, too.

The Sun. The Three of Cups.

The Wheel of Fortune. (It will be easier to breathe in a little while,

so you have to hold on.) And yes – you could pick up a drink tomorrow,

and our lovers could betray us,

and the early spring sun could careen

directly into the planet.

But right now, the sand is warm, and there is magic and healing

in the water of this day.

Our family – this family that we have wrought around us,

by blood and by choice and by power and forgiveness –

many of them have survived the winter,

are still breathing.

So, rebirth then, says the deck.

The Wheel is always turning, and I’m

shading my eyes from the mad glitter of the lake. The only constant

is change. And today,

we’re going into the water, full scream ahead,

to remember that we are still here,

in the center of the seasons,

in the center of all things.