How could I be sure that my conception of the universe is the absolute one? I could not.

She sold me on this guy using the one guaranteed pressure point for any skeptic: our own skepticism. Once I walked past a door that read psychic within, which I took to mean “within me” and kept walking.Įventually, I settled on a psychic who came recommended by a rational friend whose only point of earthly disconnect was a nonsensical aversion to gluten. You have a fraught relationship with your mother. As far as I’m concerned, the psychics on the sidewalk are hucksters: the ones with the neon signs tell you what you want to hear and the good ones tell you what you already know. Or curling up cash into little tubes and shoving it down the drain. I figured if I want to throw my money away, I’d be better served buying six-dollar lattes. In the wake of my latent powers, I looked into seeing a psychic. An instant is how long it takes to convince yourself of anything-that a banging shutter is an intruder, that you could live off juice for a week, or, in my case, that I was a full-blown witch. I couldn’t believe my eyes but then, in an instant, I could. But the next morning, on the cover of the arts section of the New York Times, was the headline “London Warehouse Fire Destroys Artworks.” At 2 a.m., right around when my postcard went up in flames in New York, a fire blew through a warehouse in east London, destroying millions of dollars’ worth of artwork, including the tent. I rushed to blow it out, thinking only of the vulnerability of my own belongings. Somehow the postcard had migrated near one of the lit candles and begun to smoke. One night, as I was making dinner, I smelled something burning in the living room. I put it on the mantel of my defunct fireplace, where I kept other precious keepsakes, like crumpled receipts, votive candles, and free-floating sticks of gum. The tent’s reproduction on a postcard whittled its meaning down to the provocative title, but that was enough to save it from the trash. Inside a camping tent, Emin had stitched the names of anyone she’d ever shared a bed with, from friends to relatives to lovers. A photograph of a tent called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, by the British artist Tracey Emin. I liked the postcards mostly because I like to avoid clutter and they gave me something to throw out. On one side of the postcard was a famous work of art, on the other a thin line, splitting the negative space. I used to subscribe to a magazine that came with a postcard crammed in the spine of each issue.

Look alive out there sloane crosley