The Savannah job I turned down for a psychic

In April 2014 I turned down a job in Savannah because a woman with a purple scarf told me Danny was coming back that month.

The job paid $18,000 more than what I was making. It came with a corner office in a converted carriage house on Bull Street and a boss who laughed at his own jokes in a way I liked. I said no in a phone call that took four minutes. I called it divine timing.

Guess who never showed up. Guess who is still in the Charleston humidity twelve years later, watching tourists photograph the same three houses on East Bay.

•••

Here is the part almost nobody talks about. I did not fail at trust. I did not fail at faith. I passed a course I should not have been enrolled in.

Real divine timing is not a chair. It is a working knee. It is the thing that lets you walk toward the next room while the door behind you closes on its own schedule.

My mother waited nine years on a man and called it faith. Died in the same house he had walked out of, never sold it, never repainted the kitchen. The universe did not send him back. It sent her nine years of a beige carpet.

“But if I move on, aren’t I forcing it?”

No. Forcing it is what you did last February when you texted him twice on a Wednesday and once on a Friday and then rewrote your last message four times to sound casual. Booking a class on Tuesday is not forcing anything. Booking a class on Tuesday is a woman having a Tuesday.

Am I telling you walking away guarantees he returns? I would be a hypocrite in a purple shawl. I do not know what he is doing with his Wednesday nights and I am not going to pretend I can find out from over here.

I know what waiting did to my March, my April, my May, my thirty-second year, and a Savannah apartment I never lived in.

The Waiting Chair is comfortable. That is the trap. It looks like devotion. It feels like loyalty. It sounds, when you describe it to Rosalind on the phone, like faith. What it is, in the body, is atrophy. You lose muscles you did not know you were using. You lose Tuesday night plans. You lose the version of yourself who liked a job for the sake of the work.

The date merchants love the chair. The chair is their product. If you are sitting in it, refreshing their page, they can sell you another reading in six weeks about why the last one hasn’t landed yet. A woman on the move is a woman who cancels her subscription.

01	What have I stopped doing ‘in case’ he comes back?
02	If I knew for certain he would decide in three years, what would I do with the next three months?
03	Which of the two women in me is the one I actually want to be at the end of this year, the one waiting well, or the one whose life got wider?