The famous Beverly Hills psychic was probably in her late fifties or sixties with a thick accent I couldn’t quite place. She looked like she would maybe work in a high-end department store, one of those women that is mean but works on commission—a confusing duality. She took one look at me and wouldn’t do it. Even though we had forty-five minutes left, she would not go through with the session. She coldly stared at me and proceeded to give me no explanation, other than that I was fifteen minutes late. She made me leave immediately, slamming the door in my face. I was so pissed. What a fucking dick. I remember then nervously thinking maybe it wasn’t about my lateness. Maybe she saw something in me she couldn’t bear to reveal, something about my energy she didn’t even want to touch—like I might die soon or be involved in a terrible tragedy. After that, I decided palm readings, tarot cards, and psychics in general maybe weren’t for me. I had enough pre-drive planning and parking rage to deal with for the time being.
Sedona was going to be different than these previous mystical endeavors. I had set aside a few days to specifically stay in one of the most spiritual places in the world—I was going to open myself up to the powers that be. My road trip was almost finished, and I wanted to look at myself in a new way—to try thinking about my energy and what I was putting out there.
I found a crystal shop by googling “Sedona aura reading,” so in a way I was offering myself to Google, the all-powerful, all-knowing. It had four and a half stars and good reviews, and because I wasn’t even sure what to look for, the fact that people even left reviews made me feel good. I often doubt my ability to choose a good restaurant or bar or store online, but this trip was proving me wrong. In each city, I’d managed to find the exact type of coffee shop I was looking for, the perfect lunch spot, most ideal indie bookstore. I now harnessed the talents to find what I was looking for—at least store-wise. The shop was cute and filled with display areas of stones and crystals, oils and spiritual reading material. A bunch of other people browsed throughout the store as they waited for their time slots, which made me feel confident I’d made a good selection. I had clearly hit the jackpot again! I spoke to a woman behind the cash register, who set me up for an aura reading appointment and photograph, and then a tarot card reading and aura evaluation. I had no idea what this entailed, but I was there to go hard-core mystical or go home. Or rather get all the items on the menu that the woman at the counter suggested.
I wandered around the shop for fifteen minutes until my appointment time, anxiously thinking about what would possibly be revealed in this aura photo; it was going to be great, a color around my head will give me some insight—maybe make me understand my current state, maybe something about the anger and frustration I’d been feeling constantly toward myself and my inability to bounce back to any form of normalcy. Sweet. Yeah, this was a good idea. This was gonna be fan.tas.tic. My aura might be a color that would acknowledge how hurt I’d felt or how I was scared to land in Los Angeles because then what? Then I’d really have to move on. Would that be like a red hue? This was good. Yeah. Great. I love spirituality and crystals—they’re all over my house, just like this shop! I don’t feel any pressure—All. Is. Good. I feel wonderfu—and just then the woman I made the appointment with earlier, over at the cash register, found me—it was my time. Phew, that could have gone on for a while.
She looked like a librarian from my elementary school, crunchy with a friendly smile as she escorted me into what I can only assume was once a storage closet. This was right off the floor of the shop, and I could hear other customers chatting about potential purchases as she pulled the curtain (instead of a door) closed behind me. Once inside, my eyes adjusted to the fluorescent light to see a desk with a Dell computer on top. She had me sit at the desk and she leaned over my shoulder as she walked me through the instructions to the program on the computer. I could barely hear her over my screaming inner monologue: HOLD UP, THE READING IS ON THE COMPUTER!?? A COMPUTER AURA PHOTO!? ALSO, YOU DO THE AURA READINGS AND THE CASH REGISTER? THIS IS A HOAX! WHAT DO YOU THINK, I’M A COMPLETE IDIOT!? I wanted to leave, but what would I say? What if this woman owned the crystal shop? What if this was her family’s company and it had been passed down through generations? What if they were barely making ends meet and that’s why there wasn’t a door in here anymore? Doors are the first thing to go! What, am I gonna stand up and call her out on this half-a-room, fake-spirituality-meter moneymaker when she just had to sell the door to pay rent? No, I couldn’t do that to her. I would stay, and stick it out for her grandparents who built this place from the ground up, one crystal at a time.
She instructed me to put my hand on what looked like a computer mouse from 1999—you know when there seemed to be a race for which company could design the ugliest, most ergonomic mouse for your hand to rest on all day? Then she said I should look straight ahead and follow the prompts on the screen. She left me alone and began the program. I was surprised how angry I was, sitting in this closet. This was the thing I had to do in Sedona? What complete bullshit. I knew it. I thought there’d at least be some old-timey, under-a-cape-type camera, a relic from the past that could see into my soul. Instead, I looked into a ten-year-old computer camera, Velcro’d to the screen of an old Dell desktop. I thought I’d get an actual photograph, not a terrible, faded color printout from Staples’ most popular Brother printer. I could have done this at home, online! I could have just googled “at-home aura reading”! I was disappointed. It felt like an obvious scam. If it had been an actual photograph, developed in a darkroom by a woman who looked like she’d been alive forever, would that make it more real? Honestly, maybe. Optics are important, especially in the world of believing in something you’re trying to not be skeptical about.
I had a few minutes in between the aura photograph and the rest of my reading, so I went to use the ladies’ room. One thing you shouldn’t do in the middle of any sort of mystical experience is use the restroom. The bathroom was also the actual storage supply closet, clearly the new home for the supplies that probably once lived in the “Aura-Reading Room.” I don’t know what kind of bathroom would have felt more appropriate, but seeing the psychics’ lunches and random mugs in the tiny kitchen on the way back from the bathroom made this all too grounded in reality. Who were these women who lived such normal lives back here in this little kitchen, only to read other people’s auras all day?
I cannot remember the name of the woman who brought me upstairs for the next portion of the reading, but I’m going to call her Deborah. Deborah feels too generic and I’m worried it might be her actual name, so I will now be referring to her as Flo. By the time Flo and I met downstairs in front of a basket of tiny blue stones selling for $10 a pop, I was done. I was not eager to solve my problem here anymore. I was over this place as the path to some sort of insight about whatever I’d desperately been looking for. I wasn’t going to find myself by analyzing a purple hue surrounding my head in a photo. This wasn’t real; the vortexes in the rain, the mountain bike metaphors, all my friends’ crystals sucking whatever bad vibes out of my bedroom at night, the very brief time spent in the meditation room—it was all nothing. The psychic in Beverly Hills didn’t see some negative energy in me she couldn’t bear to reveal, she probably just wanted to take my money and eat her lunch. I wanted to get out of there and go eat kale chips by the pool and forget I even tried this hard, but my fear of confrontation wins in scenarios like this, so I kept my appointment with Flo, not wanting to try and navigate explaining why I didn’t want to continue. She escorted me upstairs into a little room where she asked me to sit at a small table against the wall. She sat across from me and paused.
“I’m going to invite Jesus into the room to help guide us,” she said.
Ooookay. I nodded with approval. Sure, do what you gotta do. I knew going in I wasn’t going to give her anything, not one bit of information about myself. I wasn’t gonna get duped by showing excitement over a letter in someone’s name or her sensing a “new beginning” in
my life. You could say that to anyone! Not today, Flo! She looked through my file of printouts from the aura reading downstairs, my “extensive paperwork,” and nodded, “Hmm.” Ugh, this was so ridiculous—my paperwork was in a bright-blue folder, and she all of a sudden felt like my language arts teacher in fourth grade. She turned to a chart highlighting the chakras—or energy centers in the body—and proceeded to tell me my heart chakras were low, and my throat chakras (the ones that are used to communicate) were very, very low. I did feel that way. I sat there listening, stiff as I could be as a tear fell down my cheek. Abbi…Stop. Then more tears. How was I crying in this room right now? Stop it! This photo and these measurements were taken on some app on a shitty Dell computer in half a closet! And to make matters worse, I was crying not only in front of this stranger but apparently, Jesus Christ himself! But I couldn’t help it. She was exposing what I’d been holding so tightly for so long. This part of myself I’d been trying to hide, the thing I avoided communicating to anyone: that I might be right back where I started, unlovable and unable to love. I felt truly alone and might remain that way.
Flo passed me a box of tissues and asked me if I had any specific questions, and I didn’t. I couldn’t think of anything, I couldn’t even speak. I sat there quietly, frantically fighting to preserve any dignity I had left, as if speaking might unleash a new level of tears I wouldn’t be able to rein in. I took a deep breath as she began the tarot reading, placing one card on the table at a time, and with each explanation, Flo was breaking me down against my entire will. I was falling apart, and I couldn’t stop. It was as clear as I was afraid it might be, I wasn’t hiding anything. This woman stared me in the face and told me I needed balance. She made direct eye contact as she said I had made my entire life about work, and that it seems I had given up on love. From that poorly lit room on the top floor of a tiny mini mall in Sedona, a stranger told me exactly what I knew already. I guess that’s what I was looking for, someone to see me and my fears and my flaws. To see all of it and to tell me not to give up. I didn’t know I was searching for hope. Maybe she says this same speech to everyone, maybe I took what I wanted to hear and applied it to my own life, but whatever happened there with her and Jesus, I was exhausted.
But I gave them five stars on Yelp, because…damn.
SEDONA SLEEP STUDY
Alarm set on phone: 8:00 a.m.
Do Not Disturb: on
Brainwaves App: Set to—DEEP SLEEP / Rain and Thunder—for 30 minutes
Lights: off
11:09 p.m.
Shit, there’s light seeping in from the curtains.
And the red light from the TV.
And the alarm clock. Just let it go, it’s fine.
No, it’s not.
I have to eliminate the light!
How does anyone sleep with all these distractions?! I guess people wear those face masks that block out all the light…I just don’t like the elastic bands on my head all night—I never know if they’re supposed to go over or under my ears and I’m always so disoriented when I wake up after wearing them.
Yeah, not for me.
Maybe hotels put out so many different-size towels so you have lots of options to cover up light sources in the middle of the night. Washcloths are perfect for the red light on the TV, the medium-size towels that aren’t clear exactly what they’re for (too small for putting hair up in, too big for a washcloth) are perfect to cover the alarm clock, and a large towel is great for the sliver under the door leading into the lit-up hallway.
Perfect.
Taken care of.
Taking care of business, all night. Taking care of business co-ver-ing the lights!
Hahaha.
Ohh my goodness, I am so annoying.
11:22 p.m.
Good, darkness.
Hand towels! They’re hand towels.
11:30 p.m.
I should be writing more on this trip, I’m missing out on the opportunity to get everything down on paper. I can’t seem to find my process. What do other people do? Other writers and artists seem so sure of themselves. They probably don’t lie awake in the middle of the night in hotel rooms by themselves singing pop songs from the ’70s, making the words their own. No, they probably fall asleep immediately and dream all night, and then wake up, inspired by their fantastical dreams that have clear metaphors that prompt them to get lots of inventive writing done. They probably wake up and immediately go to work—so many dreams to rehash—sure, they need coffee too and go on walks too and have ebbs and flows of productivity just like me, but I bet they are on more rolls. I wonder how I can get on a roll? What do those effortlessly productive writers’ work spaces look like? I bet some are really cluttered with books and scraps of paper full of inspirations that had to be written down in a frenzy. Their walls are covered in friends’ artwork, things to motivate them. I can’t live like that—the scraps of paper everywhere, I’d spend all day cleaning it up, too distracted by all the notes I’d jotted down. Maybe some people have a sort of blank space so they can only focus on the task at hand. Minimalist. That’s sort of what my space is like now, except it’s like that because I can’t seem to commit to art on the walls and haven’t put things up. I need to be able to commit, even if it’s just to artwork on the wall! I’ve always wanted a standing table, where I can make lots of hands-on projects. I don’t really work with my hands much anymore. I will, soon, get a higher table to stand and work at. That’s a good idea.
I have to remember that, high table for hands-on projects.
11:49 p.m.
Have I always tucked my arm under the pillow like this when I’m on my side? I guess for a while. Maybe I should do a sleep study like they did on Mad About You. Was it Mad About You? It was one of those shows from the 90s. If I did a sleep study, then I’d be able to see how much I move around. Maybe I don’t need to know. Yeah, who needs to see that. I guess if I move around too much, someone at some point will tell me.
Yeah, if anyone’s back in bed with me for long enough to have a problem with it!
There’ll be someone to hate how much I move around in my sleep. I…think?
12:02 a.m.
I wonder what LA will be like? I’m only there for a few months but it will be the closest I’ve come to living there. I hope I’m productive. I think I will be. I’ll have a space, and my schedule will be different. This voice-over project is exciting. I’m glad I’m making this a priority and will be there in person. I’ve never really recorded with the other actors, it’s always in a booth by myself. It’s not every day though. Not at all. I’ll write on the other days, try to set up some other projects I’ve been thinking about. Maybe I’ll be able to set aside some time to conquer a drawing project, maybe one small drawing every day? That would be awesome.
I’ll never do that. There’s no way.
Maybe a few drawings the whole time? Even that would be great. It would be so cool to have a show one day. I have to set a goal to have a small little gallery show somewhere with my work. What is my work even like now? It could be so many things. I’m still interested in some of the same themes as I was in college, but I wonder if my style has changed? I have to just do it already. Well, it’ll be great when I do it. When I get some time, I’ll go and buy some materials, some heavy board and colored pencils, and get to it. I’ll do it, you’ll see!
Who. The. Fuck. Are. You. Talking to???
12:15 a.m.
Fuck, Brainwaves has turned off.
Gotta reset it.
How am I still awake?
I will NOT be awake by the time this round ends. No sir!
12:44 a.m.
I hate that I made that wrong turn on the highway and it became a whole fucking thing. How the silence spun into something it didn’t need to. Why did I let that happen? Why didn’t I just say something to her right then? Just said what I was feeling? She could have said something too though. I hardly ever make wrong turns, especially when I’m using my phone as a guide. I wonder h
ow I did that? I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention and it had been a big weekend. I hate this moment, this memory. I should have forced myself to speak, to say that I cared, that I was there, that I was sorry—to say all the things we were really thinking about. I wish I would have had the courage I have now to ask what was going through her mind, how she was feeling. It wasn’t about the wrong turn and I knew that. I knew that.
I Might Regret This Page 14