Slice Of Life

“No. Nothing good. No way.” The woman snapped at me.

There was no “Hello”; no “Hi. How are you?”; no “It’s nice to meet you.” Nothing.

“Of course you won’t be happy.” She went on. “It’s not your time, yet.” She shook her head. “No. No way.

”I was expecting to hear something like that, but still, getting it point blank from the first step I made into her house was a bit disturbing. Never mind that, here I was, standing dead still at the threshold of the healer’s house.

The woman zoomed back in and disappeared into one of the doors.
“Go, go there.” Her voice directed me in no specific direction.

I took off my shoes, hung my jacket on an old fashion coat rack standing against a bright pink wall and slowly walked into what I guessed was a living room: a spacious room of an intense green, barely seen behind lights, plants, and figurines of angels, Buddhas and Santas.

“Sit down on the chair.” The healer’s voice commanded. “I will be right there.”

I was still helplessly looking around for a chair, obviously hidden somewhere underneath numerous pillows, blankets and books, when the healer hurricaned into the room.

“Sit, sit over there.” She moved a pile of magazines and revealed a chair buried below. “Hope you don’t mind the icons. Don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.” I stepped over the magazines, now covering the floor, and sat down.

“I always like to ask, you know; some people don’t like them.” She lit a candle and started to burn some incents. “But I do.”

She sat down on a sofa beside me.

“On the phone, you told me that you were afraid of…living? Weren’t those your exact words?”

Her dark eyes stopped at me for the first time since I came into the house. I looked back. An unusual woman, that’s for sure. She was in her early forties, of medium height, and petite. Her big, deeply set brown eyes, heavily outlined with black, stood up against a light skin and delicate features of her face. A white shear cloth was wrapped around a mess of long brown hair; a long gown, matching color with the walls, was almost touching the floor; a bundle of chains and lockers hung down around her neck; strange signs were scribbled on her hands.

“Right.” I whispered.

“OK.”

A minute of vibrating silence fell between us.

“OK, listen to me.” The healer finally stepped in. “You have to tell me what is going on. I am a healer not a magician. I cannot read your mind, OK? I mean, I know something about you; I asked around, you know. What? Don’t you think I just let anyone to walk into my house? You got a nice living. Good job, Christmas party at Hilton Waterfront Resort, not that many can afford it nowadays. Perspective career. Sporty car, I did saw you parking out front. Just look at you. Cute, blond, and smiley. Life is good, bright and pink. Still, your are here. So, let it out.”

“OK. I feel lost.” I squeezed out of myself. “Letting it all out” felt very much like getting naked in front of a stranger, which isn’t my favorite thing, by the way.

She kept looking at me.

“I feel like…it’s kind of hard to explain.” I was looking for the right words.

This woman and I had so much in common; the same country of origin, the same language, similar backgrounds, but still, none of those helped me to open up to her.

“I feel trapped. I feel weak, hopeless.” I finally gave up.

“OK, I see.” She gently squeezed my arm. “I will make it easier for you. I am going to ask you some questions and we will go from there. OK?”

“OK.”

“Don’t be so afraid.”

Her hand was warm and soft.

“So, when did you move to the US?” She asked while looking for a note pad.

“Almost eight years ago.”

“Oh, you are still a baby!” She laughed. “I have been here for almost twenty by now. Here it is!” She opened the pad and started to write, making faces and mumbling something once in while.

“Divorced?”

“Yes.”

“Less than a year?”

“Officially, yes.”

“Who is “A”?”

“Have no idea.”

“Live alone?”

“I have a dog.”

She kept on scrambling something.

“American?”

“Yes.”

“Old?”

“Twenty two years difference.”

“He didn’t let you go.”

“No. I left him.”

“Bad, bad karma, girl. You needed to wait.”

She stood up and did a few passes with her hands around my head.

“Get up.”

I did.

“Follow me.”

“You see, before you got here, I was planning on doing something, but now I see that you need something different.” She walked into the kitchen and put a chair in the middle of it. “Sit down.”

She occupied herself with something behind my back. I could hear her opening drawers and moving pats around; soon, I felt a smell of burning wax candles and frank incense.

“So, he is not leaving you?”

“I don’t really know.” I stumbled.

She didn’t say anything, encouraging me to continue.

“You see, I was so miserable with him.”

“How long?”

“Seven and a half years.”

“That’s pretty long.”
“I know.” I had to force every single word out of me. “Anyway, I left him a while ago. I got officially divorced earlier this year. I forgot about him.”

“That’s what you thought.” She showed up in front of me, made a cross with a burning candle a few inches away from my face and disappeared behind me once again.

“Then, I ran into him on a parking lot a few weeks ago. Thank God, it was at daytime!” I went on. “He was so mad, still. He screamed. He swore. He told me I was the worst ever happened to him; he told me I was a selfish, mean, spiteful, screwed up bitch. I turned around, I walked, no, I ran to my car, locked myself in and drove away. Thirty minutes later, I was still shivering. I couldn’t get his eyes, those burning hatred eyes, out of my head. Since then, I feel like there is this big pinch black cloud over me. I put another lock on my door. I cry every freaking day. I am afraid to go to sleep at night. I have nightmares. It’s like, I am sitting on a chair, in the middle of a big, empty room. It’s dark, but I know it’s a big space for I hear an echo. I hear his voice. “Where is your engagement ring, Mrs. Mayers? Where is it?”

“Where is it, by the way?”

“I sold it.”
“OK.”

“So, I have those nightmares every night. The same one. I wake up and I cannot fall back asleep. I am getting exhausted. I feel so empty and so…dark.”

“I see. I can help you with that.” She popped up in front of me and, holding some smoking incense in her hand, walked around me a few times. “Now, what’s your ex’s full name?”

“Harry. Harry Mayers.”

“What is your full name?”

The healing started.
An hour of prayers and spitting out names of God; burning paper and incense; melting candles and starring into some foaming substance. An hour of me being lost and confused more than ever. An hour of burning desire to jump off the chair and run away, away from this place, from this crazy woman. An hour of hope and feeling of weight being lifted up off my shoulders.

Then, everything stopped.

“OK. So, what did we find out?” The healer grabbed a handkerchief and wiped a few beads of sweat off her forehead. “Things are not that bad with you, actually. It’s clear that you didn’t let go of your ex; he is still present in your life. His presence is like this big hole eating you up from the inside, but it’s OK. We can fix that. Do you know how to pray?”

“No. I have never done it.” I felt embarrassed. “I grew up in a non religious family and…” I was looking for an excuse.

“That’s fine.” She interrupted me. “Most people don’t know how to pray. For real, I mean. Here, take a pen.” She gave me a pen and went on and on; a long list of prayers, rituals, things I needed to get in order to perform it. My hand got achy trying to keep up with her, my writing became almost unreadable.

“C’mon, you can do it.”

I heard her laughing as I was desperately starring at the list of prayers I had to mumble before 6 am and after 10 pm, rituals I had to perform for twenty one day, mantras I had to listen to, daily. “Everything I told you to do, you can do.” She stood up and disappeared into another room. “Everything I tell you to go through, I have gone through myself.” She came back, holding a cup in her hands. “I didn’t want to but I had to. You see, I was young and naïve enough to recommend others to do it.”

She sat down in a little chair beside me.

“Believe it or not, I have not always been like that.” She smiled. “Like you, I graduated from a Technical University; I even got to work as an engineer for a year, back in Russia, before I moved to the US. First, New York, then, a few years later, California. I got a job here. I rented a tiny place down south with my boyfriend. It was right on the sand, overlooking the ocean. I liked to sit on my patio, a size of a napkin, really, and read. I read a lot of books. I am very curious, you know. I question everything. I search for answers. Anyway, I read. I knew a lot. Or, at least, I thought I did. I was sharp, proud, and confident. I was thirty two or, what? Thirty three, maybe, when my gift of healing awaken. It’s in my family. My grandmother was the same way. I knew I had it, too, just it was… How can I explain it to you? It’s was asleep, sort of. Anyway, at first, I started to feel some kind of presence. It felt weird, I will tell you that, even scary, in a way, but I got used to it. Then, I felt a desire to pray. Me, praying? Me, with my engineering degree? Me, born in Social times? Yes, me. I started the search for the Highest Power. I began with saying names of God, all of them, I mean. It felt so good, I couldn’t get enough of it. I started to pray. Then, I heard the voices. I prayed, I asked questions, I got answers. A year or so later, it took me only one glance at a person to know if something bothered him, I could even guess what it was. First, my family, then, my friends, started to turn to me for an advice. A break up, a cheating husband, problems at work, anything, they all called me; they were seeking help and they found it with me. They talked, I listened. I talked, they listened. And you know what? If they followed my advice, everything turned out fine for them.”

She stared somewhere above my head.

“Once, a friend of mine came to me. She wanted to leave her husband; marriage was in turmoil; he was abusive; he got drunk every weekend. Still, there were two kids, house and all that. I prayed. I was told she had to stay with him, be patient. She laughed when I told her that; still, she stayed.”

“Are they OK now?”

“Kind of.” She took a sip of coffee. “Her husband died. Anyway. There was another one. Cute little thing. Came over here, was sitting in the same chair you are sitting right now, actually. Fell in love with a wrong man, I told it to her right away; she needed to leave him. Poor creature, she couldn’t stop crying. And her story was different from yours, you see. Her man even didn’t hold her back; she didn’t want to let him go. Anyway, I did every ritual I thought could help. First, she resisted, then she accepted. She did everything I told her to. And you know what? After a while, that man did something that disgusted her so much, she couldn’t stay another minute around him.

She left him.”

She took another sip.

“Or, this one, of course. Bad, bad marriage. Husband was no help at all. Stuck around at home the whole day long. She wanted to kick him out. I told her not, but she did anyway and look at her know, eight years later, still all alone in the same house, with no man on a horizon. Anyway…” Her look sadden. “Then, all of it started to happen to me. Karma? I don’t know, but I had to go through every single thing I advised to others. It became me who had to go through living in an abusive relationship; it had to become me crying because of a man. Every single one of them, my great advices. I was devastated. My pride, my confidence, all went down the drain. Things got worst every day until I finally figured out that an adviser needed to become an advised. I did. I saw the difference. I saw how silly I was to talk about something I had no feelings attached to. I stopped seeing people. I stopped advising. I had to fix myself before I could help anyone else. I had to learn my lesson: giving an advice is much different from actually following it through. I accepted it. Patiently, I went through everything that came my way. I became humble. One day, I knew I was done with what I had to learn. I passed the test God gave me. I was so thankful! Then, I started to heal others again but in a very different manner. I never tell anyone to do something I hadn’t been through before myself. You see? So, if you do what I told you to, your ex, Harry, right? will leave you alone.” She stood up.

“OK, it’s time for you to go.”

I looked at my watch.

Three hours! Almost three hours, I spent with this woman, like in a different world.

“I see that you are lost but don’t worry, you will understand everything later. Give it some time to sink in. For now, pray. I know it sounds awkward, but, you see, when you pray you become still and humble; all those voices in your head, voices of people you turned to for an advice, so loud, so confident, will become silent. The only voice you will hear will be yours, the one you will need to listen to. It will just feel right.”

She walked me to the front gate.

“You cannot change the world. You cannot change other people, either. You can only change yourself. It’s a good start. As you change, you will see that the world around you changes on its own; the wrong people will leave, the right people will come. Everything will fall into places.” She hugged me. “You will make it, girl.”

Thank you. I know I will.