In January 2021, I pitched a handful of ideas to an editor at Austin Monthly. One such idea (a straight up Hail Mary!) went live yesterday on their site and is in print in their August issue (& as always, linked in the Elsewhere tab). For this story, I attempted to see about seven different Austin psychics (and one animatronic game) and squishing the fullness of what I would have liked to have said about the experience into my allotted 600 words was impossible.

For one, I conducted my “field research” for this story while in the thick, consuming fog of Gabe and I’s fresh break up. The story I longed to write (something with a headline to the effect of, “I visited seven Austin psychics to find out if my ex and I would stay broken up this time”) was probably too maudlin for the Goop-adjacent wellness story that went to press.

But the truth is, two people–friends, family members, lovers–build an interior world together replete with memories, dreams, resentments, and its own geographies. The dissolution of any relationship also means a rupturing of that world. Two years ago, Gabe’s other girlfriend left a voicemail where she told me that finding out he was with someone else felt like the end of her world. I was so smug then–this man is your world?–but the clarity of the last two years has really afforded me the insight that break ups between partners, friends, and family members really do bring about the end of a world.

Regardless of what you (as a reader) believe about divination, I think it’s fair to say that the wide majority of professional seers are highly attuned to other people’s feelings. So it’s no surprise that in my days-old post-apocalyptic stupor, every clairvoyant I visited knew I was going through a break up. One psychic (very offensively) told me to stop dating Black men altogether (I’d sooner stop breathing) and instead, seek out someone British. (A detail from the draft that didn’t make it into the story is that she also offered to remove a curse keeping me from finding my true love in exchange for either $500 *or* an alligator skin belt. Before I left her home, she asked me to pull up Saks Fifth Avenue online and show her the belts–so we sat, knee to knee, while I scrolled through the offerings. She called over her shoulder and into her house for her husband’s belt size. Also, I made Kendyll visit her to see if she would get the same anti-Black dating advice or whether she’d also have a curse on her love life and though Kendyll’s love life is apparently also cursed, the estimate to remove her curse was somehow $250 less?)

When I saw the final psychic on my tour, she offered me the opportunity to ask her three questions. I could only think of one: is this really it? And when she told me that she didn’t see us being cleanly out of each other’s lives just yet, I felt relieved. In those first days after our break up, Gabe and I’s emails reminded me of my stint working in law firms and exchanging messages with opposing council. He sent the first email while I was publicly kissing a friend of his under the patio at the Buzzmill one rainy night, “did you get my message regarding…” I rolled my eyes at the email’s formality and laughed, pressing my hips against his friend’s erection. It felt to me that Gabe and I were in public court, each making our case for who was right, who was wrong, and who would be deemed the winner of our break up.

Maybe it was this belief that we weren’t really through with each other and that performing closure was publicly important that sustained a certain level of calmness in me. We’d sworn off each other so many times over the previous two years only to end up whispering our proclamations of big love to each other under the down comforters of different airbnbs a week later. (When I was sober) I could get through the days hardly thinking of him and I convinced myself this was moving on.

But at night, I had dreams for weeks about meeting Gabe at different houses. I told my therapist about a series of dreams where Gabe and I meet in the future at some neutral location and separately pack our things, or spend one night together and leave in the morning without speaking. In one dream, we were meeting at a futuristic home attached to a shopping mall and when I got there, robot maids were cleaning and told me I needed to leave while they finished. I went into the shopping mall and ate a caesar salad (the Fran Fresher salad) at a The Nanny themed restaurant and asked a waiter whether my ex would have a hard time getting into our room if he also came while the robots were cleaning.

“You’re saying, ‘will the robots in the smart house leave the door unlocked for Gabe'” my therapist interjected, “but what your mind is doing is trying to decide when it’s time for you to close the door on your relationship.”

I told her that I had closed the door, sealed up its thresh hold, and bricked over it–was there ever even a door here?–but still, the dreams continued. In early July, I dreamt that we met in an old townhome with paint peeling off the walls and a single, wilting red rose on the kitchen table. As I held the rose and tried to keep it from crumbling, he told me he was with someone who’d constantly been in the periphery of our relationship and I slapped him. Again and again. When I woke up from that dream, I was actually crying. In my waking life, two days later, I flew to Puerto Rico.

I was standing on the beach in Luquillo when Gabe’s new girlfriend told me that he said he’d never cheated on me. Ocean water came up to my ankles and I thought even this sea isn’t deep enough for all my anger. When Gabe and I talked on the phone afterwards, he asked me, “what do you need from this conversation?” It was a question we’d learned to ask each other after nearly a year of couple’s counseling. In that moment, I could see myself, eyes puffy from crying, sitting across seven different Austin psychics mere days after we’d thrown in the towel–at each one, seeking out the answer to one question: “did you really love me?”

“Yeah. I love you.” His voice cracked, “A part of me will probably always love you.”

I wanted to cry but reached for anger instead, “is that supposed to make me feel better? What does you loving me mean now? What does it mean if you didn’t want to love me the way I needed you to when we were together?”

But that exchange was deeply meaningful: for one, the dreams stopped. My brain is no longer engaged in a twilight calculus of when to close the door on Gabe and I. And from this place, I think we’ve both stopped performing for the court of public opinion. We’ve since been able to agree that the most either of us need to say is, “it didn’t work out.”

There’s a really sappy break up movie (that I feel embarrassed to have gleaned anything from) where the main character writes something about how when you break something, if it breaks into big enough pieces, you can put it back together, but some things shatter. In spite of tremendous effort, what’s shattered will never be what it was. In the time since that call in Luquillo, I can see the truth in this. It wasn’t one thing, it wasn’t something he did or I did alone, and it wasn’t reparable. In the time since that call, I have learned to feel gratitude toward Gabe’s happiness in his new relationship (even as I resent it) because he deserves happiness and because that happiness has kept us, finally, from trying to mold the shards and scraps of our relationship back into something salvageable.

Where I’ve written previously about longing for a version of my future self—and even titled one such post “The Crystal Ball of an Otherwise Self,” what’s clear to me now is that closing the door on Gabe & Lauren world gives me the room to pursue that version of myself and my future—becoming another place where I can feel gratitude. It’s very fitting then, that the Austin Monthly story is accompanied by an illustration where a psychic is leaning over a crystal ball projecting an image of me (literally modeled off of my LinkedIn avatar). Laid before the crystal ball is a tarot spread showing the lovers, the fool, the ten of swords, and the star–the perfect deck for this story. Every time I look at the illustration, I love it a little more.