Fantasies and bulletins

Venus conjoins Jupiter next week; Mercury conjoins Saturn in Aquarius before moving into Pisces.

Welcome to the Saturday newsletter for paid subscribers, which offers lyric and esoteric guidance for the week ahead. Have a question for the tarot? Send it my way, and I’ll answer with a two-card tarot draw as part of the next Saturday offering.

When you are a visibly sick, somewhat-young person in a small town of “healthy,” young people and “sick,” old people, you accumulate the fantasies of the town through conversation and proximity; you become a bulletin board upon which the town pins its unspoken desires. The town becomes invested in your illness, in your symptoms that wax and wane, signs that point to something else, something different depending on the person you’re talking to, the geography of the chat.

In the fall that felt like summer, you wore t-shirts that revealed the saffron-and-chenille-like bruises across your chest, the chemo port a punctuation mark on sentences you collected from young mothers in the parking lot of the old brick building where your children go to school. I don’t know how you do it. And: We’ll bring dinner over tonight, you rest up! Their words were articulations of sympathy, and beneath that, expressions of gentle envy.

In America, parents get breaks from parenting if they have work, money, or disease, and sometimes not even then.