You Two Are Like an X-File

“How’s (fill in some random guy’s name here)?” my friend Heather asked as I put a forkful of my hoppin’ jack into my mouth at the Wishbone Cafe in Chicago on March 19, 1999.

”Fuck (random guy). He has a girlfriend,” I replied as I took a huge breath and said, “NEXT!!!” on the exhale while slamming my hand hard on the table, spell casting. He was just one in a long line of people I had chosen to become attached to who either did not reciprocate my feelings or were unavailable for various reasons.

“Okay then,” she cracked up as we continued to eat and talk, which we had spent thousands of hours doing together since high school, along with acting in plays.

We finished lunch, and I hugged her goodbye as I headed off to my Friday shift at Unseen Insight in Niles. I was almost a full year into my first as a professional psychic medium.

I walked into the shop located in a strip mall on Milwaukee Ave, sandwiched between a pet groomer called “Forever Friends” and a currency exchange. My regular Friday gig was from 4:00pm - 9:00pm. The shop was small and cozy with a couple of tables and chairs in the center surrounded by books, crystals, tarot decks, and other metaphysical paraphernalia in the front. There was also a lottery machine behind the counter.

A red velvet curtain separated the front of the store from the back, where we readers worked at small card tables and folding chairs in an office cubicle format with a table with coffee and doughnuts on the right as you walked in. Cigarette smoke hung in the air. Typically, there were just two or three of us on duty at a time, except for the psychic fairs when ten of us would be crammed back there trying to talk over one another while whispering sensitive information to the seekers for whom we were divining.

I was on a break, standing in front of the coffee table, pouring myself a cup while lighting a cigarette, when he walked by me, escorted by one of the readers. I immediately recognized him as the person I had dreamed about when I was twelve. I stood there frozen, trying to process what this might mean.

“Who is that?” I asked Katherine, who worked up in the front half of the store. She also was the person I gave a reading to when I auditioned to work there.

“Oh, that’s the guy she is dating,” she said, referring to the other reader walking him back to her table.

And yeah, if you’ve picked up on it, the shop had bordello vibes with June, the owner, in the front calling the women up from the back to escort their clients through the red velvet curtain. Of course, the larger percentage of people who came in for readings were also female, and yet still, some past-life brothel energy was seeping through that space.

“I guess I was wrong,” I thought to myself about the man with the dark hair and brown eyes who had just brushed past me. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

My next client came in, and I forgot all about him. It was a busy shift, and I was booked pretty solidly back to back with twenty-minute appointments. Clients paid a dollar a minute, I got sixty percent of it, and the shop got forty.

It was a few minutes after 9:00, and I was the only one left in the space doing any readings, finishing up with my last client for the night. I was in the back of the reader area behind the carpeted-covered cubicle wall, and if you did not already know I was there with someone, you would not have seen me.

“So, to be able….” loud noises from the other side of the cubicle cut me off. I took a breath, “So to be able……….” I began again when loud voices and laughter interrupted me once more. It was one thing to try to compete with other readers who were at least considerate of the rest of us. It was completely another story, however, to have to try to maintain the focus required to give a reading while a couple of jackalopes were screwing around next to you.

“Excuse me, one moment, please,” I said to my client as I paused my timer.

I walked around the partition to see them. She was fake attacking him with her gloves, he was backing up into the corner, protecting himself from her, and they were laughing loudly.

“HELLO! Could you shut up, please!? I am trying to work over here!” I yelled at them both and then stomped back around to my table.

Five minutes later, I finished with my last client for the night and came back out of the space. He and the other reader were still there. “Look, I am sorry for yelling at you,” I began.

“No, I am so sorry,” he said to me. “I had no idea there was anyone still working. I’m Jon.” He was warm and friendly as we introduced ourselves to one another, and again I was confused that I had felt an immediate connection to him when he was there for someone else. Turns out he wasn’t, there for someone else. I had gotten bad information.

The following Friday, I was in Cleveland helping my mother fulfill her dream of opening an art gallery. I was thirty-two and had not yet begun to dig into what I still had stored from my childhood where she was concerned. I was telling myself that she was the good parent and still operating with her much as I did when I was a child, doing her bidding and ignoring her alcoholism and sharp criticisms and meanness which at times were paired with statements of support, a real mindfuck. She summoned me to Cleveland, and I went without hesitation.

Meanwhile, Jon was back at Unseen Insight, unbeknownst to me, being grilled by June. She was on a mission to find me a mate. It had been six months since my previous relationship had ended, and she kept trying to foist various men upon me.

The following week, on Friday, April 2nd, I was back at my post. It was unusually quiet, maybe because it was Good Friday, so I was hanging out in the front of the store with June, Katherine, and one of June’s daughters, who was there with her newborn.

In he walked and, pulling up a chair, joined us at the table. I started showing off by noticing that June’s grandson was watching his guardian angel and began a lengthy conversation with the baby and the angel. We sat there for an hour or so as I waited for my first client of the night, talking and getting to know one another.

“What’s your birthday?” I asked him, thinking, “Please don’t be forty.” I have no idea why I was placing this weird condition on him, but I did.

Phew, he just passed this test. He was thirty-nine and an Aquarius, just like me.

Two young women came in and asked June about past life regression.

June shouted, “Hey, Nora, could you show these girls where the videos and books on past lives are?”

“Uh, sure,” I said, thinking it weird that she was asking me to tend to customers in this way, which is not something I was there to do. I brought them near the front of the store where the items were located and heard her say to Jon, whom she had summoned over to the counter, “Get Nora’s number. She’s high energy, low maintenance.”

J.F.C!

I walked out and stood in the parking lot, embarrassed at the match-making happening behind me. “High energy, low maintenance”- what was I, a car?”

A minute or so passed, and I walked back in to hear that it had gotten worse. Katherine had now joined in and was saying, “Don’t give him that business card for Nora, it only has the store phone number on it. He needs her home phone number”. They were laughing and he was looking confused.

I steeled myself and walked up to the three of them with one of my cards in hand, looked him in the eyes, and said, “Do you want my phone number? Because I am not going to give it to you if you’re not interested in calling me.”

“Uh, sure, I’ll call you,” he said.

I really was not sure at this point that he would, but I handed him my card anyway and then disappeared behind the red velvet curtain to get ready for my client, who would be arriving any minute.

Later that night, June filled me in on all of the information she’d gleaned from him when he was in the shop the week before.

Then, something new and different happened. Instead of going home and obsessing over whether or not he was going to call me, I just chose not to be attached one way or another. Sunday rolled around, and I headed off to my sister’s apartment for Easter, singing and car dancing along with the radio all the way there.

She lived in the apartment complex connected to the townhome development our father lived in, and somehow, she got roped into hosting that year. She’d thrown her back out and was in pain. After the meal, which was not fun at all due to our father’s continued discomfort at being a parent and his significant intimacy issues that caused him to always say the things that hurt, I offered to do some energy work on her. We spent a bit more time together, and then I left, driving the forty-five minutes back to my Bucktown apartment, no longer joyfully singing along with the radio, my family shit dragging me down.

To make things worse, The X-Files was a rerun that night. My typical Sunday ritual of The X-Files and sushi delivered to me from Sai Cafe was wrecked by the resurrection. So when the phone rang, I answered it. I mean, if The X-Files had been new, I would have let it go to my voicemail.

It was him. I don’t remember how he greeted me, but I do remember he asked how I was.

“Ugh, terrible right now. I had Easter with my sister and my father, and it was not great,” I said.

He was impressed with my honesty and started asking me questions, so many questions.

Our conversation on the phone that night was long, over two hours long. We talked and laughed, he was really funny. Jon loves an audience for his humor, and when he finds someone who enjoys his act, he pulls out all the stops.

At some point, he referenced his Moon in Scorpio, and I said, “Wait a minute, I also have Moon in Scorpio.” We had already discussed the fact that we both have Sun in Aquarius. “If you tell me you have Leo Rising,” I started.

“I do have Leo Rising,” he replied and then said, “Are you telling me we both have the same Sun, Moon, and Rising signs? I wonder if that means………You know what? I just met you, I am not ready yet to know what this means.”

I agreed, and yet, we both already knew. It meant something, maybe something big.

Towards the end of our call, he asked me if I’d yet been to Souk, which was also located on Milwaukee Ave, just much further south than Unseen Insight was. It was in my neighborhood. We made a plan to have dinner there the next Saturday. This also began a long-running joke about Milwaukee Ave, Friends Forever, and the highway.

By Monday afternoon I was wondering if it was too soon to call him. My question was answered by him calling me a few minutes later, heading us into another lengthy chat, this time while he was at work.

By Wednesday we decided we could not wait until Saturday and made a plan for him to just come by my apartment after I was done with my shift at Healing Earth Resources on Thursday. He had a meditation group to go to on Wednesday night.

My friend Amy and I went to Transitions Bookstore right before it closed on Wednesday. When we walked in, I panicked a bit as I was sure he was going to be there, and I was not prepared to see him.

“I feel like he’s going to walk in at any second,” I said to Amy.

She said, “Let’s get out of here. You want to see him next when you’re calm and ready.”

It turns out that by the time we had gotten there that night, he had just left. I was not feeling his imminent arrival, I was feeling the residual energy he had left behind.

We were already in love on Thursday, and when we traded dishes halfway through dinner on Saturday, I knew I was home.

“You two are like an X-File,” a friend said to us at a pool party we were attending at Heather’s parents’ house a couple of months later. We were in the water together, floating as one being, arms and legs entwined.

Twenty-five years later, we are still enmeshed, in healthy ways, and like everyone, are a continuing work in progress. When you like and understand each other as much as we do, after growing up with a lot of dysfunction, the relief is profound. There is no trying or artifice, there is just being. Oh, don’t get me wrong, we have had our share of battles and conflicts, past life bleedthroughs, childhood issues intruding, and the occasional huge fight, but the connection is always there, even in our darkest moments.

Unseen Insight is long gone from that strip mall, but Forever Friends still stands.

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