In late November last year, I had a tarot reading with a psychic, a thoughtful birthday present from my friend Meg. With the psychic, we discussed at length the very obvious thing that was causing me grief: my own broken heart. Which looking back, she may have sensed before we even began speaking. It was certainly on the cards she shuffled back and forth then laid on the table. Back then, it was written all over my face, I saw it in every photograph I looked at of myself, no matter how banal.

She began by saying that too much of my energy was placed outside of myself, and that I needed to meditate to bring it back in, which I never did. I can’t say why. She also suggested a cord cutting spell, which when leaving the apothecary, I knew I would never do. I knew that in some non-linear and metaphysical way it would help, but for better or worse, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I could not and would not sever a cord that I believed was fated, predestined, written in the stars, kismet. Whatever you want to call it, that is how I felt about it. While writing this now however, I can see that I stood nothing to lose, either. If this connection was so set within the bounds of the universe, as I so faithfully believed, then surely this spell was harmless. Besides, I’d already learnt the unfortunate thing about stars, eventually they get crossed. So what was I still holding on to?

We fluidly moved into other aspects of my life, and this is when she asked if I had any holidays coming up. I thought about the her question, scarcely able to recount my last holiday, and aware that we only had forty-five minutes together, then answered back no. Then quickly corrected myself and said that actually, I was planning to attend what had become my family’s annual trip to the Blue Mountains in the coming March. Which I myself had never been on, in the last three years of it taking place. Though I had felt a pang of jealousy every time they returned, with fresh memories I was not part of, I just simply wouldn’t of left my cat or partner at the time for that long, usually three weeks. The psychic, however, said the forthcoming trip “must happen”, that it was inevitably going to be “very healing” for me. I noted this remark, but it soon slipped to the back of my mind, after something she’d promised to happen in January did not transpire. I knew as soon as she made the promise it would not happen, that it was much too out of character for who she was talking about, and though she was the psychic, I knew them better than she did. But I blindly believed, hoped, and prayed for it; I had been since our final goodbye. Maintaining such blind faith, well into the tail end of January, seemed on par with divine belief, which it may as well have been. Many other things did transpire though, things she simply couldn’t of known, which—though I have faith in such things—fascinated me.

By March, I had actually forgotten all about her message for my upcoming holiday, after all, an entire summer had passed. However, upon my return from the Blue Mountains, once I recalled what the psychic had said, I did find myself agreeing with my foretold future. I realised this a few weeks after the fact, as I was writing in my journal that I was (typically) behind in. When going to write down feelings spanning January - February, I stared at the notes I keep when I am behind, so as to not forget, and felt like I was staring down at someone else’s life. So remote were these feelings that I almost did not want to cement them into my journal. But I did, however macabre they were, because this is the deal I make with my journals: nothing is off the table. Just like nothing was off the table when communicating with the psychic.

I know that my words cannot do justice that the Blue Mountains and Wiradjuri Country deserve, but it was simply beautiful. We hiked, I saw my first ever Lyre Bird, we went to restaurants, I wrote and sent nine postcards to my friends and family. I read and finished two books, we climbed high altitudes of mountains and low altitudes of canyons, and swam under waterfalls. We drank red wine, we watched the sun rise, we bonded. Something within me had begun grafting back together in the copious amounts of laughter that took place over the trip, something which, after being broken for so long, went unnoticed to begin with. The realisation happened only after the trip concluded, when recounting it to my friends.

That I did feel healed, in more ways than one was absolutely true, this revelation was like being struck by an arrow—a bullseye. The psychic had been right. With her track record, more things had come to pass than things that did not. The disappointment I’d felt at January’s end quickly dissipated. My heavy heart had, when crossing state lines, returned to Melbourne lighter and less like a burden to carry. It was more like a fact of my existence, something that had happened, that now I finally accepted. It was simply part of my history. A relic. Yes, it was something that could be difficult to bear, tiresome even, but it was not the end of the world. Which was how it had felt when we packed the car with our things at the start of the trip. Things in my life had begun to grow around this grief of mine.

By joining my family to the Blue Mountains, I had finally got to visit Wiradjuri Country, where my Mob is from. Truthfully, we were on Country, though we were not camping, and every single day was spent getting tangled in the abounding nature that surrounded us in every direction. Thinking back now, I can’t point to any exact thing that caused this catalyst, this long awaited change. I could say it was the clean air, or the high level of exercise and subsequent dopamine, but most likely it is probably credited to my family, the very act of reconnecting with Country, and the passage of time. The thing that everyone had told me, with such kindness in my darkest moments, that “time is the only thing that will help”, was true. It was not a myth. It was not a fiction. It was not something people just say so that you will stop crying in front of them.

The Blue Mountains may well have been the catalyst that began this healing, as foretold by the psychic, but I felt its affects long after the holiday. It was all encompassing, it swelled within me. I felt it when I drove myself to hospital appointments on my own, where armed with my books in the waiting room, I never felt alone. I felt it when Meg and I sat on her apartment floor and assembled furniture from Ikea together. I felt it while walking around the gallery floors of the NGV with my friend Indra. All these things I would’ve, before the holiday, before the hospital, and before my heartbreak, associated with having a partner. One person that you do all these things with. Because we did. Yet now here I was, single, doing these things with myself, with my friends, with my family.

Of course, the psychic couldn’t of known that this feeling would transcend my holiday to the Blue Mountains, but then maybe she did. When she had seen me in November, she spoke to me as if I was made of glass; as if I was fragile, delicate, let one wrong word slip and I would break. In typical fashion I was one minute late and rushed in, out of breath and profusely apologetic. She stopped me and told me to take a deep breath and ground myself. I can’t help but wonder what she would say to me now, and if she would still speak to me like that. I would hope, if anything, she’d speak to me like tempered glass the next time around. Something that, while still fragile, is designed not to break into a million tiny pieces at the hands of another. In any case, after having such a guideline of the future, I think for now I may lean more into the surprises that life has to offer. And maybe by next January, her prophecy will come to pass. In the meantime, I will be patient and continue to heal.