when you haven’t been in love it is easy to say “i won’t take her back.” to him, their love affair was like a favorable game of poker, until she left him staring at a royal flush across the table, and his entire world collapsed like a deck of cards.

card 1: how you feel about yourself: the hermit:[1] you feel all alone and introspective at the moment. you cannot find answers to your questions in this state so give it time, the answers will come. be prudent and patient. but the scotched lover is never prudent or patient. he was inconsolable. he felt like a child who was left midway through crossing a busy highway by a mother who had lost her sense of responsibility. she was his venus, his brains, his emotions – his trinity. her parting words rebounded in his head like a drunken kid on a trampoline “i will only come back when you want me – when you give our relationship the priority it deserves.”

card 2: what you want most right now: the devil: you cannot have what you most want at this time, and like the forbidden fruit this only makes it all the more tempting. you may be tempted to go for something else, but it would be a bad choice and you’d be doing it because you feel hurt and for all the wrong reasons. the insanity of the circumstances had driven her sane. she realized he wasn’t the one she should be with. he was adventurous, he was fun, he was handsome, he was intelligent, he was rich, he was sweet-smelling, he was tall, they were everything beautiful together, and they drew the familiar cliché “you look good together,” but she told him one morning, “looking good together isn’t everything.” and then she left him when he needed her the most … there is never a right time to leave a lover, but there is always a time to know when you’ve had enough. the reason was simple – he had no intentions of settling down. his good was his bad. he believed everything was temporary, and that made him happy. he couldn’t stand the idea of permanence. this did not mean he purposefully tried to destroy the good thing between them, but rather, he felt a very strong pull towards freedom, as opposed to dependency. he has a reservoir of instinctual drives, which most of the time is dominated by his pleasure principle and spontaneous thinking. he was his own worst enemy – he was unmanageable. he refused to be manageable, and it sometimes got him in trouble with her. for instance, if he felt like not doing something because of a very strong principled position, and in spite of all that was facing him from a detrimental point of view, he remained true to his nature. for her this was a deal breaker. and she was just as bullish about what she felt was just.

            card 3: your fears: justice: there are issues of agreements that concern you and you certainly don’t want to lose – you feel quite strongly that you are in the right. stay calm and level-headed and seek sound counsel if you need to. no one was getting in her ears but her own voice. so, she listened to her own voice when it said, ‘listen girl, you see, when you know someone is taking you for granted in a relationship – don’t up and leave. let them know they are undermining you, but continue to treat them well, and if they don’t change, knowing how you feel, you leave them. there is no use bottling up, and becoming a source of irritation and bad companionship. when you leave them having treated them well, they will miss the good you are, not the source of irritation you became.‘ the voice was right – we don’t miss bad things … so, she left him when he needed her most. after she left, he started to troll her. checking her whatsapp dp constantly, she didn’t make it difficult for him to trail her path of mascara happiness. mascara looks beautiful when in place, but a tear-drop and the face darkens. but he wasn’t aware of this, fear had taken over. because fear had taken over he couldn’t see her face in the pictures, he could only see the faces of those who were in the pictures with her – they seem to be having a good time. pictures viewed with a heavy-broken heart makes everyone in it look vicariously happy. as face replaced face, pleasure place replaced pleasure place, heartbreak replaced heartbreak. he forgot that ex-lovers who troll their exes easily lose sight of the fact that their ex is sleeping with someone else now, and they can’t change that – you can’t turn back what is already done. so, keeping track of her only scraped the wound in his heart with each new face he saw. he forgot ex-lovers who troll their exes usually become frozen with fear, hoping against hope that the current face would be the last one – that’s just your thoughts not your ex’s new reality. so you hurt. he was hurting bad.

            card 4: what is going against you: the moon: you are confused and as such lack nerve and you are frozen with fear regarding what you actually want. you need to stop allowing your fears and anxieties to hold you back. you should open your mind to new and unexpected possibilities. he stopped listening to the dells sing on repeat, “since you left, life don’t mean a thing/i see the moon, i see the sunrise/but there’s nothing in between/sorry is the word, oh, but fool is what i really mean/’cause when i touched you girl, i touched the queen/i touched a dream, yes i did, oh/i touched a dream.”[2] he picked up his life. he stopped trolling her. he put her conversation history on whatsapp under ‘archive’ so he wouldn’t see the changing dps. then he immersed himself in pleasurable activities and his work. soon, heartbreak turned to heartache. soon heartache turned to ache. soon ache turned to acceptance. he didn’t forget how she hurt him, he simply decided to only remember the good times they had together. then he would talk to her in his head when he was in any difficulty. gradually, she became the wise voice in his head not the vitriol in his heart.

               card 5: what is going for you: the hierophant: your situation is not entirely hopeless. don’t be concerned about making the right decision, there is help at hand, just ask for it. someone with the right moral fiber will come to your rescue. they say when one door closes, another opens? lie! when someone closes one door on you, someone else will walk through that same door in the other direction – towards you. it is never another door that opens because the other door that is supposed to open in that saying brings in the same thing, so why use another door? it is the same business that the other door will supposedly open up to, so why not use the same door? it is the same you who will receive what is in the room that other door supposedly opens up to, so why not use the same door – why not remain in the same room and let someone else open that same door and enter the same room. it’s better this way. remember the saying doesn’t say that you should go opening doors – it says when one door closses, another opens. besides, why walk into an empty room? the human body is made up of memory cells, and they save us when we are afflicted by what has afflicted us previously. the same must apply in love. you’re not starting afresh, simply rearranging the furniture using your memory cells of what didn’t work previously. his old room was moldy, cluttered with evily recycling history, and dark with drawn curtains. his new room was redecked with yellow moods and positive thinking – he reassessed himself, identified his own flaws, held no one in blame but himself, and waited for the door to open. it did, and in came many. in came anita, boemo, cecilia, dema, evelyn … but he wasn’t interested – because he was not ready. men may fall in love faster than women, but they hurt longer. he wasn’t going to make the same mistake, he wasn’t going use the same template, he wasn’t going to have to compare this new lover with her, he was going to let himself make someone happy and receive what good comes of it – even marriage. so, one by one, the candidates shut the door on their way out. they say there is courage and strength in numbers. someone should tell them, in love, there is heartache in numbers. he found himself with women whose idea of the holy trinity was body, breast, and butt, he found himself sitting across restaurant tables from women who couldn’t spell  napkin, he found himself in his car with women who were not ashamed to tell him what perfume they wanted, he found himself in hotel rooms with women who only knew something about wages, weaves, and wigs. she found drug, she found rejection, she found out what men say in the pursuit is not their reality when they catch you, she found unrequitedness, and in spite of all that surrounded her, she found heartache and loneliness. she found out arabella was right when she said (of sue) at the end of thomas hardy’s jude the obscure “she may swear that on her knees to the holy cross upon her necklace till she’s hoarse, but it won’t be true! … she’s never found peace since she left his arms …”[3] besides, you lose your self worth when you expose yourself to too many lovers, and as each one falls by the wayside, desperation sets in. when the reason for leaving wasn’t a doubt of love, comparison happens, and comparison is a bitch! for when comparison sets in, the obvious happens …

            card x: the likely outcome: wheel of fortune: there is change on the horizon – and it’s coming quickly. fate, destiny or synchronicity, call it what you like, but positive change and good fortune are close. and just as he found peace, his phone buzzed: “i still love you!” and the madness started all over again … he considered the fact that she would’ve met many men by now who won’t go away easily when she returns to him. but when you haven’t been in love it is easy to say i won’t take her back.

Copyright © F-K Omoregie 2016

[1] Idea for card readings from https://hermesgod.wordpress.com/category/tarot/page/3/. Accessed Monday June 20, 2016.

[2] Dells, The. (1980). I Touched A Dream. I Touched A Dream. 20th Century Fox Music.

[3] Hardy, Thomas. (1999). Jude the Obscure. New York: Norton & Company. P322.