The first time someone read my cards was in high school. My best friend’s great grandmother told me to think inwardly of a yes/no question; she then flipped over three cards and immediately exhaled. I didn’t know anything about Tarot but the card in the middle scared me. The sky was dark; lightning struck a stone tower; flames inhaled the top of the structure; two bodies were mid-air, hurled from what seemed like their home.

My question, of course, was if my boyfriend and I would stay together— that was the only question I knew to ask because the relationship consumed my every thought. It wasn’t a good relationship; in fact it was abusive and went on for far too long. I knew the answer was No but when my friend’s great grandmother told me No I became offended. It wasn’t the answer I wanted or maybe needed; if it had been a Yes, all of my toil for the last two years trying to make this relationship work would have been worthwhile.

I can’t remember the other cards in that reading. I stopped listening after the word No. A decade later, I’d come back to The Tower and identify the moment lightning struck that relationship: a shitty apartment in Murfreesboro, Tennessee where he was trying out for a minor league baseball team; a Saturday when our never-ending argument turned physical; his hands around my neck, my back shoved against a wall; my clothes and tampons and makeup strewn across the lawn of the apartment complex where he’d heaved them. If I had left sooner maybe the breaking moment wouldn’t have been so violent, so scary.

I’ve always stayed until I’m thrown. Until I’m falling, staring up at the shelter I mistook for home.

Tarot has popped up in my Substack before— in 2022 I wrote a post that referenced Six of Swords. In 2024 I wrote a post referencing some of my favorite women in the Tarot: 9 of Pentacles, The Empress, and The World. And again in 2024 I used Tarot to process the shock of my high school friend overdosing. That post included an image of The Tower.

I don’t use Tarot as much as I did in 2020-2022, but I do like ruminating on cards. Sometimes their imagery helps me focus my journaling and assists me in getting specific about my headspace. My friend Bijan gave me a quite literal life-changing reading in 2019. The Tower was present in that reading; it’s shown up a lot for me since. I’ve mostly used the traditional Rider Waite deck, but last year I randomly discovered Salvador Dali’s illustrated Tarot deck at a book sale. It’s been interesting to use this deck, to reimagine what some of the cards are saying with his dream-like artwork.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this Substack, especially its title. And I think the cards detailed below have been tiny matches struck in my dark. Little moments of spiritual Knowing. Tarot has been around since the 15th century. Centuries of human lives have used these cards as tools, attempts at moving themselves toward understanding or actualization. I like imagining Dali working on his deck, contemplating his own Tower moments. Below are short vignettes about some of Dali’s cards that I’ve been spending time with.

In Los Angeles I spend $9 on a coffee and then immediately remember the smell of my school bus driver’s coffee breath at 6:45AM. My brother and I were bus kids all throughout school, Bus Number 5 driven by cranky old Tim. We were on the same bus route as the kids who lived in Fohl Village, the trailer park across the street from the small ranch I grew up in. Once, as another bus driver maneuvered our middle school class down Interstate 77, I pointed to the house next door to ours and said it was where I lived. That house was bigger and its siding wasn’t an ugly green like ours. Our house could be mistaken for a trailer. My friends who lived on Carnwise, the populated street where many families in our school district lived, felt so far away from me on those bus rides. Their parents had bachelor’s degrees and if they drank beer it was something better than Busch. I never knew if we had enough money but I felt that we did not. My parents work and work and work but still they never looked like the Queen and King of Pentacles, proud of what they’ve achieved. I did not see them relax or reflect outside of my father drinking to oblivion. I stared out the window on the bus, ten years old, afraid to imagine more.

I’m home in Ohio again and shaming myself for all of the ways I’ve been triggered. My packed books remain unread; my manuscript hasn’t been touched. I miss the lighting in my apartment and how comfortable I feel on my couch. As with every other time I’m home I collect evidence of why I can’t stay here, of why I’ve never belonged. I wear a mask when I see people I went to high school with but it’s the mask they’ve always known as my face. It’s not that I feel unloved or unwanted in this place; it’s that I can’t touch my own authenticity when I’m here. My return flight gets delayed enough that I miss my connecting flight and am forced to spend the night in an airport hotel. I’m so desperate to be home, back in the space I never wear a mask in, that I begin anxiety-spiraling, wondering if my life in LA is all just some dream I’ve made up and that I’ll always be the sad girl on the bus waiting for something to begin. When I land, finally, at LAX, I miss my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, my nephews. I can’t be there but I want to be. Every time I leave I’m sliced with Six of Swords; I know I must leave my place of origin but the leaving hurts. It never hurts less.

In order to finish my book I tell myself that my father will never know it exists. The anxiety otherwise overpowers me, handicaps my ability to tell the story I need to tell. I amass archival information and court records; I read my grandfather’s prison record until I have his prisoner number memorized. Some days I’m working so hard I forget to eat. Some days what I’m reading, the violence committed against my father when he was a child, affects me physically. I get a cold sore, a sty on my right eyelid. I am holding so much generational pain I feel close to bursting, Ten of Wands begging me to put the burden down or ask for help. When I win the Cincinnati Review Nonfiction contest I know I have to tell my father. The title essay of my book will be published in print, our family secret available to those who seek it out. My heart flutters with anxiety when I call him. I pace my street as I deliver the news. He clears his throat and I think he might be crying. It’s about your dad, about what happened. He congratulates me, tells me he can’t wait to read it, asks how he can get a copy. I tell him he doesn’t have to read it but he insists. It seems too easy, his acceptance; but he’s been carrying these wands a lot longer than I have. Now we carry them together.

Lately I’m enraged by things I shouldn’t be. People talking in movie theatres. People lining up before their zone is called at the airport gate. People watching YouTube videos without headphones on, volume blaring. The rage in my body feels outsized but I’m pissed nonetheless. I’ll ask people to stop talking, I’ll rat on someone not using headphones on a flight. I think at a time of so much injustice, after watching the suffering of Palestinians for years now, after the fires in Los Angeles reduced homes and communities to dust, after Trump’s relentless attacks on trans people, after RFK Jr’s confirmation, after so many people lose their jobs and Elon Musk demands the absurd, these small injustices grate. Why can’t we make our communal living experience, especially in public spaces, better? Why can’t we do what’s best for the entirety rather than the individual? Maybe it’s not my job to meter out Justice but then who’s job is it and why aren’t they doing it?

The Tarot podcast I listen to informs me that Nine of Cups is a dreamy card. It’s having the courage to imagine all of your dreams coming true. The host says that this card ignites fear in us and I’m struck by that— how getting everything you’ve ever wanted can feel terrifying. If I am to honestly look at my life’s dream I feel slightly embarrassed. I want to be a writer, I want to publish my book(s). I want to be loved by my husband for eight lifetimes. I want a child. There’s no way we can get to Ten of Cups, the real fulfillment, the embodied actualization, without working through the Nine. And that Ten is beautiful; joy and community and playful celebration. I loathe the language surrounding goal-setting and feel silly using terms like hopes and dreams. But maybe they feel silly because I’m scared by how much I want them to come true.

Hypervigilance lives inside me. I’m too attuned to my friends’ texting patterns and moods, too aware when things feel off. Before we got married I awaited The Tower crashing in on my relationship. I fear surprise ruination so much that I try readying myself for the ruin. A good friend texts me daily like we’ve done for years; she invites me to her birthday and to her husband’s graduation; and then she ends the relationship. I’m left dangled in the air looking back at our relationship, the tower I thought was sturdy and safe. Months after I’ve hit the ground I can see the rot at the base of the tower; I accepted a wobbly foundation and forgot, mistaking it as sturdy.

I’m trying to talk less about the ways people have hurt me. About how trust can be worse than broken, betrayed. The people falling in the Rider Waite Tower look terrified, and so did I when that boyfriend put his hands on me, when that friend met me at a bookstore and made me cry with her list of my inefficiences. But I like Dali’s imagery; the two figures are falling but there’s a grace to their fall. They could be flying.

I’ve survived every fall from every Tower I’ve been tossed out of. I can’t prevent the unexpected ruinations. But maybe as I fall from what I once trusted as safe I can twirl my body so that I’m facing what has ejected me. Maybe I can give it the middle finger. Maybe I can say thank you. Maybe those two things are closer to one another than I think.

News:

• I have new author headshots! My friend Jenna Powers took these for me and I’m so grateful. It’s not easy to capture the things I’m after in an author headshot but I think Jenna nailed it. LMK if you have a favorite :)

  

  

• My winning essay will be in the May issue of the Cincinnati Review print edition. Details to come!