Free Psychic Junkie by Sarah Lassez Page A

were Jonas and I—both stubborn and prone to drama—the combination was positively volatile. Soon our evenings together began to resemble scenes from The War of the Roses , and still Aurelia persisted that ours was a destined love. Destined for what? I began to wonder. Romeo and Juliet’s had been a destined love, but that hadn’t worked out so well, now, had it?
    Somehow, through tears and determination, I stayed with Jonas, though I continually felt twitches of instinct, nudges of insight. Leave. This isn’t right. You shouldn’t be fighting like this. But was that just because of Drew? Each psychic sat on my shoulders like a devil or an angel, barking commands into my poor befuddled brain.
    During a rare peaceful time with Jonas, I decided that Aurelia was right and Jonas was the one , and, this being the case, clearly we should move in together. After I approached him with a sweetly worded ultimatum, he agreed, and Gina began the hunt for a new apartment. Well, really it was I who was hunting for her, as she’d recently started working at a literary agency for a man who called her Servant Girl, and time was not a luxury she had. Every day I’d scan the papers for new listings and then plan my life with Jonas, envisioning romantic dinners at home, copper pots, and a lifetime of free foot massages.
    When we found Gina a place she liked, she packed up to leave, informed me she was taking Onyx (who, upon our moving in together, had slighted me by choosing her closet over mine), and then, before I knew it, was gone. I filled the resulting void with the beginnings of my life with Jonas. She took her TV, and I convinced Jonas to buy a new one. She took her couch, so Jonas and I went shopping—eventually and mistakenly buying one that was too big to fit through the door and that had to be hoisted through the balcony, and may be permanently stuck there. Still, everything was so encouraging, so wonderful…except for the fact that he wouldn’t move in. He’d been furnishing and paying rent at our apartment, but the our part was a bit misleading, because at the end of the day he was nowhere to be found. He kept going home, “home” being the place where I wasn’t.
    It seemed there was always an excuse, and three months later the only thing that had made it from his apartment to mine was a life-size Princess Leia cutout. I sequestered Leia in the empty room, sat on my gi-normous couch, and told myself all was fine.
    Facing facts isn’t easy for me. If I want something, I have a very, very hard time giving up. My brain is like a Venus fly-trap—even I can’t make it let go of certain things—and when it does finally release, it does so at a disturbingly slow pace. So, after four months of having a Princess Leia cutout as a roommate—during which time Jonas actually got a new roommate himself at his apartment—I had to face that perhaps he wasn’t ready to move in.
    After countless tarot readings, we broke up. There I was, in my great apartment with a view of the city and all the makings of a wonderful life, completely alone and frantically pulling tarot cards to see if I’d done the right thing.
     
    With time I did feel I’d made the right choice, but the frantic card pulling never stopped. Two very celibate years passed, and I tried to ignore that not only was I about to turn thirty, but I also had no real source of income and had been reduced to buying groceries and anti-aging creams with the checks MCI and AT&T sent me (a blessed benefit of my long-distance friendship with Aurelia). Thank God for those checks because, although eating tends to be important, I’d have done just about anything to anti-age. Thirty, as far as Hollywood is concerned, is one shaky step away from cutting out coupons for PoliGrip and comparing walkers on a large community porch. You age in actress years, each birthday hurtling you forward with such speed, such vicious force, that when someone at a liquor store asks to see your ID,