Hocus Pocus

When I was a teenager, a fortune teller read my palm and told me that I would find true love in my life, and together we would be married and happy for ten years, but after those ten years my true love would die.

Now, I'm usually pretty skeptical. Not hard-nosed cynical, but skeptical. I don't believe that things happen for a reason, I am churchily agnostic, I don't mind opening umbrellas indoors, I am scared of ghosts despite not believing in them, and I'm not entirely sold on electrons.

But unaccountably, I instantly believed this little nugget of tragedy and still somehow do. Amidst all the balderdash I hear and dismiss in a day, something in this rang sad and true in a way that must have satisfied some sense of calamity in me. Now and then, when I remember the death foretold, thoughts of future success and contentment are dogged by an image of me weeping over love lost and wistfully recalling those words and thinking how I knew it all along.

Why am I telling you this? Because there's one other piece of nonsense I believe in, and that's that you can jinx your fate by saying it out loud.