I once had my palm read by this fabulous old psychic man. He had a kind face that reminded me of someones grandfather the type with so many laugh lines playing at the corner of his eyes, which always twinkled with a sense of mischief. He had this strange habit of stopping mid word and staring off into space for an indeterminate amount of time, and then suddenly starting again as though nothing had happened. Everyone said that in those moments he was having a vision of some sort. I tended to believe them because the things that came out of his mouth tended to be terrifyingly accurate.
One day I asked him to read my palm. Palmistry is such an interesting art, and by far I find it one of the most shady of divinations. I have never had two palm readers come back with the exact same information. The basic things, the major things, all tend to be the same, but the detail? Yea those change all the time. On palmist told me once it was because our hands constantly change and the reading is only accurate at the moment it is given.
He was different though. I knew that whatever he said was going to be much more profound and true than any other reading I had ever had. His slightly pudgy finger, which looked oddly well manicured, lightly traced over the labyrinth of lines that cover my palm. I am told it is a sign that I am an old soul. He made all the requisite "hmm" and "ohh" noises that you expect when some one is divining something about you from lines on your hand. Then he said something that I had not expected and filled me with dread and excitement all at the same time.
"Well that is weird."
He said it very dead pan and simply pulled my hand closer to his face for further examination. He tended to be a little more eloquent than the statement that had just fallen from his lips. I was not certain I wanted to know what he considered 'weird'. I mean come on the man does this for a living and has certainly seen some bizarre things before. The fact that my palm rated as weird was a little disconcerting.
After careful examination he lowered my hand so that I could see it as well and pressed his finger down onto my life line very close to the start and asked me if I saw the line. I was not certain which line he was referring to as my life line, and all of the major creases in my palm, is covered in little hash marks. He pressed harder as though that would somehow help me find what he was looking at, and finally I was fairly certain I knew which little dash he was referring to.
He proceeded to tell me that it was a line of emotional detachment and it fell on my line sometime around age 5 to 7. I was not certain what this meant. I am anything but emotionally detached. I am if anything an over emotional person. He sort of smiled and shook his head making the beads and feathers on his hat flutter about his face.
He explained to me that the line indicated, that while I had intense emotional attachment to people while they were in my life, once they left my life I could detach from those feelings. It is not that I would not mourn their loss, and it was not that I would not miss them, it was just that I would move on without any great amount of disruption to my life. You hear about those old couples that when one dies the other is not far behind because they can't live without them? Or the people who go through divorces and their lives crumble because of the loss of their spouse. Yea I will never be one of those people because I can let go.
He said what was so strange was that most people never develop this skill. He said that the earliest he had ever seen someone learn this lesson, that was not a sociopath, was around the age of twenty. It is the age when people leave their families and set out on their own, or lose their first major love. Typically if you are going to learn this lesson that is the time to do it. You don't often see it in children who lose a parent or loved one because children process death differently. He said most people who did learn this lesson didn't actually learn the lesson until very late in life, until they had experienced a great deal of loss. He said most people just never learned it.
I assured him I was not a sociopath which only made him laugh again. He said he could clearly see that I was not a sociopath, and he assured me it was not a bad thing. It was actually probably a good thing and really incredibly healthy if you thought about it. I was never going to make myself sick over losing someone. I would always be able to live my life despite loss. Not many people can say that.
Looking back over my life, I can not deny the truth to his reading. I let go of things easily. I love hard and I mourn just as deeply, but I have never experienced loss that was crippling. I have experienced some pretty significant losses in my life, I just processed them and moved on.
I fear that someday this is going to make me look like a very cold hearted person. I am fairly certain that in my life I will lose someone or something that while being emotionally devastating, will not really put much of a stop to my life. I will continue on and continue to function and I don't think that people will understand. I wonder if they think I am just putting on a brave face and suffering in silence, or if they will just think I am some sort of callous heartless bitch.
I am neither. I am just living. I am just being me.
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