My Turkish Love Fortune

Once a professor of Darcy's asked everyone to indicate their zodiac sign and handed out a horoscope to everyone in the class, indicating that it was unique to their sign. He then asked the class to raise their hand if they thought the description of their zodiac sign matched their personality or perception of themselves. Almost the whole class raised their hands, and then the professor told them that they all got the same thing.
Recently there was also this belief that there was a shift in some shift in the astrological chart thing because of Babylon and the tilt of the Earth's axis over the last 3,000 years. Under normal circumstances, I don't buy into the idea that fortunes can be read and horoscopes are real. It's fun, like an arcade or viral YouTube videos, but not to be taken seriously.

Except in the case of the Turkish Love Fortune. If' you've never had your Turkish Love Fortune read, it's probably because you don't know my friends Laura Grover or Erin Evans. People and their love interests and their hearts, intentions, problems and general love fortunes are laid out in front of you with a normal deck of playing cards.  One reason I believe it is  because the readings always seem to bring to light a lot of things we should already know about our relationships, the other is because of this one specific time...

Laura, two other friends and I were at Denny's in Auburn late one night. I was 19, dropped out of art school, living at home. I'm not proud of this, but one of the girls with us had a boyfriend, and he and I made out when they first started dating. But the timeline of morality and decision making in my life is not the point of this story- it's that Laura gave her a Turkish Love Fortune, and I was in it! But she didn't know that I'd made out with her boyfriend!

Anyway, here's the audio of my latest Turkish Love Fortune reading from Laura's last visit. It's about 12 minutes. Cleveland and I have been spending a lot of time together, and things seem to be going remarkably well. The existence of some people are mentioned in the reading, but I can't tell you who those people are. Ask me on your own time. Otherwise, my Turkish Love Fortune said that we were pretty much good to go.



Oh, and this is what some horoscope mumbo-jumbo website said about my zodiac compatibility with Cleveland. I'm an Aries, he's a Sagittarius.

"Those Sagittarians born between 23 November and 3 December will be the most spiritually close to you: you could even find your soulmate here. You will gain new insights in a relationship with these sensitive Sagittarians."

Dark Shadows

It's a fifteen minute walk from my apartment to Tess's, through the heart of the West End. It was extremely windy, dark, about 9pm on a Friday night. In addition to an actual cemetery, which to me, is scary in the daylight, most of the houses on these streets are huge brick mansions with vast, expansive yards which create a lot of dark shadows. Most of the windows in these houses were dark. There are no cars, no other pedestrians, not even any fanatical dog-walkers. (Even people who live in the heart of this neighborhood agree that it' haunting... check out the story at maine. Magazine.) Lady Gaga coming in through my earbuds is not blocking the deafening rustling of the trees in the wind. Through this noise, I hear a creaking, like metal on metal. In my wildest imagination, I can't think what terrifying thing could possible be producing this noise, but that's just it- the unknown is so much scarier than the known. It was discovered earlier in the week my boots are NOT made for running, so to take my mind off of things lurking in the shadows, watching my every move, I do what I always do when I get scared: I called Laura and leave her a lengthy voicemail in a panicked tone of voice and arrived at my destination in one piece.

The next day she says she has a story to rival my story, which yeah, wasn't really that spooky unless you were there. Big deal, I was freaked out by the WIND. She was cleaning out a closet in her house (one that hadn't been used since she moved in,) and there was...

...a body bag.

They couldn't identify it at first, was it a tarp, or a garment bag... because other than people who work in hospitals, funeral homes, and oh yeah, people who watch Grey's Anatomy or Six Feet Under, no one should know what a body bag looks like. There was a toe tag, and a little contents key to mark weather the body had an infectious disease or was decomposed or whatever other ailments dead bodies might have.

Holy. Shit. Was their landlord plotting a murder??