my life in tea

The Past:
I saw a woman with long fingernails, she let me know how to turn my cup (counter clock-wise three times to get rid of the tears). Her round glasses sat low on her nose, her round face circled with wirey gray hair. She was wearing a necklace with a grey-white oval stone. She smiled up at me and I couldn't help but thinking of her like a canyon lady out of Joni Mitchell's song, telling me my future by the way the tea leaves stuck to the edges of my cup.

Everything is filigreed, there are angels which surround me, charming my life. A 'K heart M', and she lets me see it so I know she's not making it up. "Ken loves Mandy, or something like that", she said. And there it was! She sees five children, or children in five years. She sees a C-trip, maybe Cuba? Australia is in my future, in the next four years for sure. Animals all over the place, especially the Australian kind.

She sees my relationship as a good one, with a guy who treats me well, and she sees that I have great expectations for this to be a great relationship. But he won't be the one I marry. That K looks like scissors now, if it means Katie, maybe watch out for a woman around my boyfriend, a nasty ex-girlfriend. I don't know!

Sitting in this "Salon de Tea", the night felt funny in the first place, the snow finally fallen and the lights gone up downtown. Walking hand in hand to the appointment it didn't even feel like Guelph, I felt older somehow, and I wonder how it will feel to live somewhere where I'm not a student, to be an adult and maybe to feel differently about it.

I'm trying to do homework now that my reading is over, but I want to remember things, and I'm trying not to listen to what she says to him- I don't want to hear it, and I realize that I didn't want him to hear what she was saying to me. She asked if I was pregnant, it was the first thing she asked me. I told her about Emma's miscarriage, and she said she thinks there's another baby in Emma's future, and probably soon! She said that a lost baby never leaves you, that there is no animosity, that sometimes a baby just isn't ready to come about, but that the same baby might come the next time.

The woman who works here is on a computer with her son, and it seems like they are having a personal conversation, with concern over absenteeism, maybe apathy about school. Not arguing, but there's concern, and it seems funny to me that this building houses all of these personal issues and premonitions right now.

I wonder about this tea leaf canyon lady, want to know how she knows the things that she does, how she learned to look into a cup full of wet leaves and see the future and the past. I wonder what her life is like when she goes home. I see her apartment in my head, everything ornate and shiny, probably full of sentimental knick-knacks. I wonder what her family is like.

I think about the things that she said and I wonder now if I'll think about them later when my life lines up with them, or if it doesn't. I'd like to see her again, or someone like her. I'd like to look into my own leaves, I think I am going to try.

The Future:
Everything she said was true, or came true.