CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - GUIDED

It’s amazing what you discover when you actually listen.

I stepped out of the LA metro, onto the sun drenched streets of Korea Town, and began the quick walk to Friar Laura’s apartment.

Before you ask, dear Nurse, yes, I have a car. Remember my obsession with my Rav4? And while I love driving and driving culture, parking and parking culture makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Whenever I’m going to Hollywood or anywhere near Downtown, I always opt to take the train. Sure, there’s loads of crazies, some of whom bear a particularly pungent funk, but I’m a New York City girl, remember? Funk ain’t got nothing on me…. Unless someone touches me. That's fucking disgusting.

Thankfully, on this particular Monday, the train ride was uneventful, as was the walk, padding past looming, art deco, high rises in my red, vintage high tops. I felt like such a rebel, visiting a friend in the middle of a work day, and I loved every second of it.

I had never been to Friar Laura’s before. Throughout the entire course of our two year friendship, we had either met for coffee or chatted over Zoom. But she had bragged about her new pad in recent months, and I was eager to see it.

Well, dear Nurse, the lobby of the beautifully restored 1920s, Los Angeles apartment building did not disappoint. Mediterranean-style floor and wall tiling, complete with hanging Turkish lamps. An old fashioned mail room window that reminded me of Eloise and The Plaza Hotel, and even a shining, gold, mail drop between the elevators. Don’t get me wrong, I love my 70s, Studio City two bedroom, but buildings like this pull on every string of my old fashioned, city-dweller’s heart. The walls speak, and if you listen closely, they’ll tell you fabulous stories.

“Coming!” Friar Laura chirped on the other side of the door, and I could hear her shuffling around her tiny little dog as they both came to the door to greet me.

Friar Laura gives incredible hugs. Not just because she’s all heart, but because she has a fantastic rack. I mean big, amazing, enviable boobs you just want to snuggle up with and take a nap on. Plus, she always features them perfectly with a strappy bra or tank.

“You’re tiny!” She exclaimed. “You want something to eat?” I smiled. She’s such a mama bear.

“I’m good.” I replied. I had shoved a piece of vegan buttered toast down my throat before running for the train.

“I have a pink pineapple.” She said, very serious. “It cost me twenty-five dollars.”

“Shit.” I replied, just as serious. “Then, yeah. Let’s do it.”

Most of what I know about Friar Laura pertains to work and career. We’re both in the same industry, though in different occupations. Either way, I know her best as a creative, a big, bold, loving extrovert, and a hard ass worker. Though I knew she and I shared many of the same spiritual beliefs as it pertains to concepts of the Universe, spirit guides, and a general love of all things mystic, what I didn’t know was that she’s a real deal clairvoyant. I mean, holy shit.

“You ready for your tarot reading?” She chirped again, after we had devoured the pricey pink fruit and shot the shit about my recent career developments.

“Oh, sure…” I said. In truth, I couldn’t wait for my tarot reading. I had been stoked about it for days, but I didn’t want to put pressure on her to dive right in. But in that moment, I realized, Friar Laura wasn’t just doing this as a favor. She was genuinely curious and excited to see what was in store for me. Once again, I underestimated a friend… or myself. Sometimes, dear Nurse, people really just want to do things for and with me. Some day I’ll own that, I promise.

“So, do you have a specific question in mind?” Friar Laura asked, removing a terraced selenite crystal from a shiny, black tarot deck.

My eyes wandered across her open, spacious apartment, and down the twinkle lights strung across the wall. I didn’t want to come off as basic, but of course I had a question. One big question that flashed on and off in my mind nearly every single day. She knew it, I knew it, and there was no point in dancing around it.

“Yeah… I want to know if [Romeo]’s gonna show up.” I said with a laugh. So, maybe I am basic. Friar Laura loves me anyway.

“You sure you want to know that?” She asked, giving me pause.

I know I should have other questions right now. I should be asking about my career or my kids. Where Benvolio is concerned, I should probably be asking about my mental health. Where the fuck my life is going. But you know what? I spent every day of the past ten years wondering about that. Since the moment I started graduate school, all I have worried about is career, career, career, and then kids, kids, kids, followed by Paris, Paris, Paris. So freakin’ what if for 30 sweet days, I get to be a kid again, and wonder if the boy I like is going to check the “yes” box on the "Do you like me?" note I passed him.

“Yes. I want to know.” I said, and tried to prepare myself for anything.

Friar Laura shuffled and laid out the cards.

“Oooh.” She said, her eyes widening. I honestly couldn’t tell if that was good or a bad.

“Well,” She started, “I do think he’s going to show up.” I inwardly exhaled. I mean, do I think Romeo is going to show up? Yes. Yes, I do. But do I think it’s going to magically be happily ever after all in one perfect moment? Come on, dear Nurse. I’m not that basic.

“But it's not going to be what you're expecting." She said.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Well, it's going to present a kind of new beginning...” Friar Laura continued, as she pointed to the Judgement Card sitting up high at the top of my Celtic spread. “You’re thinking of this as an end to something, but it won't be. You’re going to have some judgement calls to make.”

Yeah… Between the conservative republicanism and the fact that he wants to have kids, I can certainly see where some rational judgement might be needed in this situation.

“Once you’ve had your fun, that is.” She said, and I gave a sideways smirk. Yes. Fun with Romeo was definitely first on the docket. Once I released a decade of sexual frustration all over him, we could get down to brass tacks. I’d say… about six months. Maybe a year. It’s been a long decade.

“But your guides want me to tell you something important. They’re saying that even though you’re independent and you’ve taken this big, important step in your life, you’re still having trouble seeing yourself without a man.”

I hung my head. I had written about this very subject earlier that day, but clearly, purging on the page wasn’t enough for my spirit guides or Friar Laura. And the fucking annoying part about it, is that it’s true. I didn’t do this so much when I was married, but whenever I was single, and especially now, I often imagine my life as if it’s a private movie screening. People I care about, people I want to care about me, being granted the exclusive opportunity to watch me go about my day, seeing me in my natural habitat, and just adoring me. Like I said, I think I’m extremely charming, and if there isn’t anyone around to appreciate my charmingness, I pluck someone out of my past, and plunk them into the Juliet Capulet screening room. At present, given the whirlwind reunion, forced distance, pining, wondering, and missing, Romeo has had a front row seat for the past month. But, dear Nurse, I’m as savvy as I am charming, and even I know that viewing my life as a performance piece for someone else is not healthy, or what my spirit guides recommend.

“What’s going on with your bedtime routine?” Friar Laura suddenly asked. Immediately I felt the blood drain from my face. The way it does when someone calls you out on something they have no business knowing.

Since leaving Paris, and particularly since starting the Juliet Anonymous Project, I had been running full tilt at all hours. It used to be that I would stop working at 4:30, make dinner, clean up, go for a walk with the kids, put them to bed, and then spend at least an hour winding down. Either watching a show or reading if I had project research to do. Lately, however, between divorce paperwork, switching all my bank accounts, single parenting, keeping up with work, and writing a chapter every. single. day, I had found myself working all the way up until 10/10:30 at night. I knew it wasn’t helping things any, but how the hell did Friar Laura know that?

“Your spirit guides want me to tell you that you need to calm down.” Shit, spirit guides. Tell me how you really feel. “And they want you to come back to your practice.”

Okay, now, shut the front door!

As I’ve told you, I’m a Pagan. More like an eclectic, solitary Wiccan - though, unlike Romeo, I’m not a fan of labels. I love the rituals, the sabbats, and moon cycles, but most of all, I love divination. I have more oracle and tarot decks than I can count, three pendulums, a divination coin, and I even have the Prediction Rod board game from the 70s - a little gem I picked up at the Melrose Trading Post. Every full moon I like to pull three cards from The Lunar Nomad Oracle to tell me what’s up that cycle, and then each week on Monday morning I pull three tarot cards from my favorite tarot deck of all time, The Dreamkeeper’s Tarot, and commune with my spirit guides about what to expect in the week ahead. Back in my twenties I would have rolled my eyes so freakin’ hard at me, but I have found, the more divination I do, the more ridiculously spot on it is. And what was happening with Friar Laura at this moment was a prime example, because…

I hadn’t pulled a tarot card since leaving Paris. I did pluck some cards on the full moon, but wasn’t even bothered to look up their meanings. With everything going on, I had decided it was okay to take a break from my spiritual practice. To stop actively trying to ground myself, connect, and check in regularly, in favor of just getting shit done. Plodding forward. And, since I prevented my spirit guides from telling me this directly, they were now using Friar Laura as a go between. This reading was getting real, and really uncanny.

“They’re also telling me you have to rearrange your furniture.” She said.

I screwed up my mouth, pondering this one. In attempting to reclaim the apartment Paris and I once shared, I had moved around some of the furniture in the living room. Opened things up a bit, switched pictures out of frames, etc.. It hadn’t changed a ton, but it’s a two bedroom apartment. There are only so many object configurations possible in a small space. But what I had done in the living room, I liked. Much like when fellow writer gets back to me after reading a new work, I wondered if this was really a note I had to take.

“And they want you to know that you don’t have to take the first offer.”

“Oh!” I laughed, “That’s crazy, because my lawyer just e-mailed me a contract, like five minutes before I got here.” It was true. And the contract had been unexpected too, from a company who was still trying to piece together a larger deal pertaining to the project in question. I had already been thinking that whatever the contract said, I would have to pump the breaks.

“Yeah… they’re not just talking about work.” Friar Laura said, tilting her head knowingly.

Ah-hah. Yep. I had been trying to avoid this one, but now I know, when it comes to Friar Laura and her tarot card readings, it doesn’t matter what you ask, everything is going to come out.

In the days previous, when all I had been focusing on were the myriad of reasons no one would ever want me, it did occur to me that Romeo might be it. That if, for whatever reason, he didn’t show up on the 24th, that I would be up shit’s creek without a cock paddle. I wrote about this a few days ago, so I won’t bore you with it again, but I had, more or less, settled on the fact that my options were now limited to Romeo, or a handful of dudes with herpes on Positive Singles.

“You can have any man you want.” She said as if reading my thoughts. But this time, I wasn’t sure if it was coming from Friar Laura or my guides.

“No!” I said, hanging my head.

“Why not?” Friar Laura challenged me. And I was about to say it-- and then I looked in her eyes. She was dead fucking serious. And she knows me. Not only does she know me personally, but like you, she’s been reading along. She. knows. everything.

I suddenly couldn’t say it. I couldn’t give her a single, meaningful reason why that statement wasn’t true. Because, I realized in that one amazing, beautiful moment, she is totally fucking right.

I have two beautiful kids, a supportive ex husband, a fantastic fucking career that’s about to explode, and, as I reminded myself yesterday, I’m compassionate, hella determined, talented, and romantic as all get-out. And I have a benign skin condition that’s wicked manageable. I’m fucking hot, and about to hit my sexual peak.

Suddenly, all the things I'd been telling myself were cons were suddenly pros. Like, big pros. And you don’t like my skin condition? Fine. Your fucking loss. It’s natural douche repellent. Save me the time, HSV 2. Thank you, and check please.

I hugged Friar Laura goodbye with everything I had in me - I had to. The boobs. You get it. - and then I pranced through the sweltering streets back to the train. She had told me exactly what I needed to hear - not everything I wanted to hear - but either way, I felt free. Yes, I had absolutely begun to think that Romeo was my last resort, if he was a resort at all. But we’re talking about Romeo, here. If I, Juliet Capulet, am going to be with Romeo fucking Montague, it’s going to be because I desperately want to, not because I think that’s all there is. I’m never doing that to myself again, and I’m certainly not going to do that to him. Whatever our relationship looks like after the 24th, it’s not going to be some depressing, stuck-with-you, bullshit daytime drama series. It’s gonna be a smokin’ hot, HBO, flash-in-the-pan mini series, or Shameless - it’ll run forever and no one will never get sick of it no matter how old the actors get.

But something else about that reading was bugging me during my train ride home. Something I just couldn’t make sense of. What did my spirit guides mean by telling me to rearrange the furniture? Friar Laura had even repeated it, doggedly, again before I left. Clearly it was an important message, but like I said, I had done that already. Well, I had done it in all rooms except for one…

I got home from picking up the girls, and while they played in their shared bedroom before dinner, I stood in the doorway of my bedroom, staring at the bed. I have never owned a king sized bed before in my life. Little ol’ me doesn’t need that kind of space. But when Little was born, I had fantasies. Romanticized visions of the four of us, Big, Little, Paris, and I, snuggling together and watching movies, or wrestling around… laughter and pillow fights. I saw it all, and so I dropped some coin on a brand new, king-sized mattress and box spring, the massive bed taking up half of our bedroom.

And what actually ended up happening in that bed? Me. Laying there. Sleeping alone. Sometimes nursing Little. And that was pretty much it. Looking at it now, nothing in this bedroom had gone to plan. No fun sex, no fun times, no laughter, and no pillow fights. If I was being honest, this bedroom was a fucking drag.

And then suddenly, a lightbulb went off. Between the rearranging-furniture command and the bedtime routine challenge, I suddenly knew what I had to do. I had to move this fucking bed, and I had to do it right now.

I gave Paris’s side of the bed a big ol’ shove, and there it was. The Roomba that had vanished days before. I had been worried about that little guy, searching under the couches and chairs with flashlights trying to find him, and here he was. A clear sign from the universe that I was on the right track.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to move a king-sized bed, six-foot dresser, and two nightstands around a single room by yourself before, but it is intense. I imagined I was playing room Tetris, inching objects around one another, getting stuck, having to go back, and try again. All this while attempting to keep all the crap I store under my bed where it belongs.

My first idea was to center the bed under the window. That way, I could still put a nightstand on either side. But where the fuck would the enormous dresser go? Tetrising around the room, and Little, who had decided to join the fun, I slid the huge dresser up against the foot of the bed, and stood back.

Jesus fuck, no. The entire room had vanished. The bed and dresser eating up even more space than it did before.

The hell, man? Were my spirit guides fucking with me? This was the only other place the bed could go. I have a tree bolted floor to ceiling on the other side of the room. If I tried to put the bed over there, there wouldn’t be any room for the second night stand, and that simply wouldn’t…

Omigod.

It all made sense. Not only had Friar Laura’s reading illuminated my need to rearrange my furniture and change my nighttime routine, she also made a point of telling me that the message was loud and clear: I had to stop seeing myself as someone’s wife or girlfriend. And let me tell you, dear Nurse, dual nightstands has everything to do with that.

Do you still sleep with a glass of water next to your bed? I had texted Romeo the day after our incredible, Friday night makeout sesh. I always thought that was adorable.

You know it. He texted back.

It’s not remarkable, sleeping with a glass of water next to one’s bed. A lot of people do it. But back when I was 22, that kind of self care was completely foreign to me. The fuck was water, anyway? I knew coffee, I knew Red Bull, and I knew beer. Water? What are you, fucking Charles Eugster?

I never forgot it. A funny little detail, but I realized that even now, after cutting him off and my insistence on making this month about me, I was rearranging my own bedroom thinking about where Romeo was going to put his fucking glass of water.

And this isn’t a Romeo thing, Dearest Nurse. Every bedroom I’ve had in my adult life, whether I’ve been single or not, has always had space on both sides of the bed. I mean, who wants to sleep next to a wall, right? But the deeper issue, which I am now coming to terms with, is that I was always leaving room for someone. Never quite owning my own space, because, at least in my mind, it wasn’t complete unless someone else was in it.

Well, no more. This wasn’t Romeo’s bedroom, or even Romeo and Juliet’s bedroom. This was my fucking room, and guess what? I only sleep on one goddamn side of the bed.

I pulled up the rug, trapped Little in a safe corner with her training potty, and tetrised the room around all over again. I shoved the head of my king-sized bed up against the wall, the complete opposite of where it had started, and pushed the far side all the way into the corner. I put one of the night stands over by the dresser, and the other next to the bed, and loaded it up with all my new, pretty pink sex toys.

I stood back in the doorway and gasped.

“Wow. The room looks so much bigger, mom!” Big said from behind me. And she was right. Not only was the bed not devouring the room anymore, but the entire space had opened up. The flow felt different, the very air around us. Like I could breathe. Thank you Friar Laura and spirit guides. I can breathe in here.

So, it seems, the more work I do, the more work I find I need to do. But it’s okay. Every realization makes me feel a little bit stronger now. More prepared for the road ahead. And less itchy about September 24th. If Romeo does show up and wants to see where this goes, great. It will be a new beginning in many, many ways. If he doesn’t show up, I’ll be bummed and probably a little embarrassed that I got gussied up for nothing, but I’ll be good. I can have any man I want, remember? And if he shows up and tells me it’s a no go, you know what? So be it. There’s no place for him to put his glass of water now anyway.

Sincerely yours,

Juliet