I am afraid of Pisces season, when all my serious relationships have ended, each a few days later than the one before. There’s no safety after Valentine’s Day.
“I think you’re just too emotional for me,” Hannah says, this year.
I throw myself into socialising, into work, into cooking and swimming. I sit on the floor with my friend’s baby, advise him never to grow up and fall in love. I have lunches and dinners and drinks with acquaintances with whom I want to be closer, bake cakes and carry them to parties and parks across the city, visit my friend and her baby again. I cry on the tram home and notice shuffles of fear at my sniffles, though most of us think, then, that coronavirus is something happening overseas. We fear the disease’s arrival, not its presence.
Fifteen days after the breakup, though, that changes, and we all start to stay at home.
Why Hasn’t X Contacted Me?
DISCONNECTION, IN THIS INSTANCE, IS FOR YOUR OWN PROTECTION.
I spiral into confusion as I try to make sense of the breakup. There are so many stories that I can tell to explain the relationship’s dissolution, but some of the stories contradict one another and none of them satisfy me. It should be simple. I loved Hannah and she didn’t love me. But the mysteries of why we love certain people, or fail to love them, remain infinite.
I need to distract myself, but I can’t go anywhere. I decide that I must form independent relationships with Hannah’s interests, neutralise her passions so that I will no longer miss her each time I think of them. Hannah read out my horoscopes as we lay in bed, often, and so I join the astrology website that we’d consulted together.
In addition to horoscopes, the site offers an Oracle. The Oracle consists of a dropdown menu, with eighteen questions, a graphic that shows two pink hands holding a large pink orb against a backdrop of teal crystal, and a button reading ASK.
What Do I Need To Know Right Now?
THE PAIN OF DISCIPLINE IS FAR LESS THAN THE PAIN OF REGRET.
LOCKDOWN PSA: DO NOT TEXT YOUR EX, I read on Twitter.
It is the beginning of lockdown and nobody knows the future, if intimacy is gone forever.
I don’t like the tweet, though, because I’m friends with most of my exes. When Hannah broke up with me, E— drove across the city to comfort me, asked for Hannah’s birth time and explained the breakup through a set of celestial transits. I cried to I— a week later, via FaceTime. I exchange Instagram messages regularly with J—. I don’t message Nick, my most significant ex-boyfriend, because he told me, seven months after our breakup, that he didn’t want to hear from me again, but he’s the exception to the rule.
Soon, DON’T TEXT YOUR EX becomes a meme, darting from Twitter to Instagram. I think, each time, of Hannah reading the phrase. I wonder what she thinks of it, of me.
What Is Holding Me Back Right Now?
THIS IS AN ISSUE OF POWER. OWN YOURS!
I don’t remember the first time that I navigate to the Oracle, but I notice, relatively quickly, that clicking through the eighteen questions seems to soothe me. I tell myself I am clicking on the Oracle for fun, almost to laugh at the answers, but it is easy to see that the Oracle is becoming a coping mechanism, even if I’m not sure why. If clicking to update the Guardian’s liveblog stokes my panic, clicking on the Oracle’s Ask button calms me down.
It might be the ritual of it, which doesn’t require much thought, and the finite set of questions. It is meditative, like a postmodern rosary, each click a bead, a form of prayer.
I ask every question, every time, in the order that they are listed. I am not trying to dwell on the breakup, but many of the questions refer to love and my mind links these questions to Hannah automatically. What was the meaning of my attraction scenario with X? I ask the Oracle. Why hasn’t X contacted me?
It makes sense to substitute X with Hannah.
How Will My Next Encounter With X Go?
BETTER IF YOU DON’T GET TOO MUCH INPUT FROM YOUR FRIENDS.
I tell myself, after the breakup, that I’m just longing for Hannah’s friendship, and perhaps it’s true. I don’t make much distinction between types of love; friendship is a form of romance. I wonder if Hannah will reappear as suddenly as she’d left. I claim to value myself too highly to want somebody who doesn’t want me, and yet it seems cowardly to calibrate my desires in such a defensive way.
We don’t always get the things or people that we want. We’re lucky if we get them often or even occasionally. I don’t think that any of us wanted a pandemic and yet it’s the world into which we’ve been delivered.
Why Hasn’t X Contacted Me?
X IS A REFLECTION OF INNER TURBULENCE. SORT YOURSELF FIRST!
The desire to know the future, according to psychoanalysts, is fairly universal. We focus on it, especially, when our lives are difficult, trying to wish our problems into the past. We hope that time will give us back the things that we want, the things that we’ve lost.
It is typical for the demand for psychic and divinatory games to rise in times of chaos. The Ouija board became popular during the 1918 pandemic, in which over seventeen million died. It was billed, alternately, as a “mystifying oracle” or “the magic game,” and was “a national industry which bids fair to rival that in chewing gum,” according to the New York Times in 1920. In 2020, most psychics have seen a drastic increase in customers and internet searches asking how to read tarot cards are up 78%.
Even during lockdown, psychics report the most common question is: when will I find love?
Is There Any Romantic Potential For Me With X?
YES.
I am reminded by my friends, as I apologise for my inability to move past the breakup, that the pandemic makes everything harder, because it means that Hannah isn’t only a person, but also a representation of life before lockdown, when physical intimacy was possible and my future looked promising rather than dismal. If I had somebody else’s name in my mind, perhaps, or had opportunities to meet other people, I wouldn’t read X as Hannah.
I’ve read, before, that unrequited love offers a safe sort of pain, allowing a person to remain in a fantasy instead of facing the reality of moving forward, opening up to the possibilities and demands of reciprocal love. I am, as I click on the Oracle, looking toward an imagined future, assembled from pieces of the past, rather than to a real future, with all its attendant mysteries and new players. In my fantasy, there are trips to the cinema, kisses, interstate travel and dates in bars, all of which are unavailable now.
I know that pining for somebody who doesn’t want me isn’t cute and that if I chase somebody who doesn’t have time for me—even as a friend—I’ll just hurt myself. I know that I’ll be okay indoors, socialising on FaceTime, that I’ll adjust. I know, too, that my angst is minor and a greater grief is looming, both globally and in my own life, as acquaintances, a close friend and an elderly relative fall ill. It is easy to know these things, but hard to accept them, and I let the Oracle feed my delusions, sometimes, as a temporary escape from the pain.
What Should My Strategy Be With X?
YOU THINK X GOES AWAY OR THE SITUATION IS NO MORE BUT IT COMES BACK—BE READY.
These days, many countries have laws that mandate that divination must be labelled as entertainment, as a game. I feel sure that I read, when I joined the astrology site, that the Oracle was intended as light-hearted fun, but I can’t find this statement, now, when I scour the website. I find, instead, commenters’ stories about the wisdom of the Oracle.
I discover that my fixation is nothing compared to those of others. I read that one person has asked two hundred questions in less than an hour, pushing the Oracle to breaking point. I read that many people struggle to limit themselves to one set of questions per day.
I’m not sure if I trust the Oracle. I wonder if I would do so if it were analogue rather than digital. I don’t trust algorithms when it comes to communing with the divine. Why not, though? I ask myself. I trust the internet to deliver messages to my friends, to handle my money, to provide the information that determines whether I go out or stay inside. I start a new job, working from home, during lockdown and so I have, if one discounts Zoom, never met my boss.
“While clicking a button on your keyboard or phone may not seem as earthy or organic as physically shuffling cards or yarrow sticks, Source Vibe can flow perfectly well through the particles of light moving at warp speed that pulse through the internet,” I read. The site’s creator calls the Oracle “entertaining and amazingly accurate.”
I don’t always like the website’s language, which furthers my scepticism.
I think, though, about all the rare minerals, violently extracted from the earth, that power my computer. I can’t see why I shouldn’t trust the Oracle, why I should dismiss it as a game.
What Should My Strategy Be With X?
GET ON WITH BEING AMAZING OR JUST LET X DEVISE THE STRATEGY.
It is comforting to dwell in half-belief. If we act as if prophecy is a game, it offers promise without threat; we can choose to believe it, but we don’t have to believe it. It offers new ways of looking at our lives, but isn’t fatalistic. In this space, we’re not responsible for everything, but we still have some agency.
It has been my desire for control, in the past, that stopped me from moving forward after breakups. I couldn’t accept that the end of a relationship might not be my fault, because to concede this would make me powerless, a victim rather than an agent of change.
I think, again, of Nick, my ex-boyfriend. I’d felt grateful to him for the breakup, which was necessary, yet furious at the way in which he vanished, writing that an email was too difficult. I didn’t mind losing Nick as a lover, but I was devastated to lose him as a friend. I spent months chastising myself for small errors, calculating the algebra of our breakup.
I decide, now, that if we are to be friends then Hannah will have to be the one to make the effort. I want to be friends with Hannah, to gain some modicum of closure, to find a narrative for the end of the relationship in which I blame neither myself nor her. I have to learn to cede control, though, rather than to obsess over details or strategies. I won’t chase Hannah’s friendship, I decide.
I need to learn that I am powerless, sometimes, and to forgive myself for that.
What Should My Strategy Be With X?
YOUR NEXT ENCOUNTER CHANGES EVERYTHING FOR THE BETTER.
In Greek mythology, Oracles offer missives from the gods. Oracles aren’t playful games, but essential to statecraft, demanding the sacrifice of goats and girls, too, inadvertently. I’ve always been interested in the most famous of these, the Oracle at Delphi, and its priestesses, young women with power, delivering messages after inhaling sulphur, in a state of mantic madness. It was never the Oracle’s wisdom, in ancient Greece, that was doubted, but human interpretation.
This Oracle’s questions and answers all centre upon the individual, not the world at large. It looks away from mounting death tolls, heartless politicians, elderly women who cannot receive visitors. The future of everybody and everything feels so uncertain, but the Oracle doesn’t know about the pandemic, doesn’t mention it. The Oracle offers only confident responses to questions that ultimately don’t matter, and that’s comforting.
Why Hasn’t X Contacted Me?
IN A WORD, DECEPTION.
I tell a friend, as I write this piece, that I am embarrassed to reveal my reliance on the Oracle to the world. I am afraid that it is not, in truth, an understandable means of processing or distracting myself from the enormity of the pandemic, but rather a pathetic story of somebody who fell in love and couldn’t let go, who clung to delusion when she couldn’t cling to a person.
I feel pathetic because I’m not sure the Oracle was a game, for me, because part of the solace came from believing in it. I feel pathetic because I was thinking about myself and my ex-girlfriend as the world dissolved. I feel pathetic because I’m still in love; Hannah’s gaze seems like the guarantee of my worth and her gaze is nowhere near me.
I am reassured by my friend, who tells me about her obsession with curating homes on Pinterest, and by another friend, who tells me she’s addicted to Reddit. There are many writers who can’t stay away from Twitter. In all these cases, I think, there’s something soothing about the fact that something as innocuous as clicking promises new perspectives by which to comprehend the world.
We can’t, during the pandemic, escape in the usual ways.
Why Hasn’t X Contacted Me?
THERE IS AN UNKNOWN FACTOR TO THIS SITUATION.
I am on Skype with a friend, one night, when I see my ex-boyfriend’s name in my email inbox, with the subject line: Hello.
In his email, Nick writes that he never wanted me out of his life forever, that he still thinks of me, often, and uses his memories of me as a therapeutic tool, imagining the things that I might say to calm him down in stressful situations. He apologises for how he treated me during our relationship, though he says nothing of how he acted after we broke up.
He writes that he wants to be friends.
Immediately, I think of my frustration each time that the Oracle said that my ex-partner still thought of me, that I would hear from X soon. Nick’s email feels like a small victory, but my disappointment is larger. I’d wanted Hannah to return; I’d wanted Hannah to want to be my friend. I’d failed to remember that other people had preceded her.
I trust the Oracle more, now, but trust my own interpretations less.
We want to know the future in order to assure ourselves that we’ll get the things that we want. In truth, though, time usually accustoms us to loss, and we find we don’t need those things anymore.
I see the flaws in leaving an Oracle’s missives to mortal minds. We’re clouded by our own situations, cannot read through the haze.
I wonder what our lives will look like when we’ve grown accustomed to these larger losses.
What Was The Meaning Of My Attraction Scenario With X?
A LESSON AND NOT A PLEASANT ONE BUT YOU LEARNED IT.
Anna Kate Blair (website, twitter) is a writer from Aotearoa. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and her work has recently appeared in The Big Issue, Archer, Lucy Writers’ Project, Meanjin, Reckoning and The Lifted Brow.
Image based on a photograph by Alberto Berlini, under a CC BY-NC-SA license, and released under the same license.