"Mike" (name has been changed to protect the guilty, cheating, scumbag) was my first "real" boyfriend...my first love. We broke up and got back together many times over several years. I won't bore you with the details but he was a lying, cheating scumbag.
Anyway, after the first big breakup - he went home to Ft. Lauderdale and I went up to New Jersey to spend the summer working for my uncle in a t-shirt shop at the Jersey Shore. It was the first time I had ever really gone anywhere by myself, much less up North!! I was rebelling a bit (also, in typical post breakup mode) and cut my hair really short...
(much like this!)
I spent that summer working, lying on the beach, and listening to music with my little Sony Walkman...I listened to Jimmy Buffet's One Particular Harbor, the Beatles, the guy in the photo above (it WAS Jersey, after all!), and Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart. I moped. I was 20 years old, and my heart had been broken.
Next door to my uncle's t-shirt shop was a fortune teller...an old gypsy woman. She used to stroll through our store, and would just take something if she wanted it, and then nonchalantly announce that we could come for a reading. She never paid. My uncle told us to go ahead and go for a reading...that was just the way she was.
All the other girls went in for a reading, but I hesitated. I had never met a gypsy, or a fortune teller before - and I was nervous. I didn't know WHAT to expect. I was also very, very skeptical.
Finally one day I went over. I held out my hand for her to "read" my palm, and I was determined not to give her any clues or ask any questions.
She read my palm and she read the cards. She told me that...
* I would have a serious illness in a few years, but I would be OK
* there was someone I loved but that we had broken up (OK, good guess, whatever)
* Then she said that we would get back together and break up a couple more times.
*THEN she told me that he would come back to me but I would push him away and not be interested.
* that I would marry someone else
* that I would have two children - a boy and a girl.
I scoffed walking out of there. I was convinced that she was a total fake who had just guessed or made stuff up. As if I would EVER push "Mike" away. Right. And an illness? Please. I was 20 years old. I was invincible. And marry someone else? Never. "Mike" and I were going to get married.
I thought she was full of it.
I was NOT impressed.
Until a few years later when "Mike" DID come back (again), and I wasn't interested. By that time I was more mature and thoroughly sick of him. I had met Tim...the man I DID eventually marry and have two children with. A boy and a girl.
Hmmm.....
Then, a few years later I did get very sick and was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease. I'm fine now - completely in remission - but for a while there I was hospitalized and very ill.
Hmmm....
So maybe she wasn't a fake. Maybe they weren't just lucky guesses.
Or...maybe they were.
What do YOU think?
