I was staring at my blank page tossing around in my head all sorts of ideas for a story/post. As usual, none was good enough.
Because today is a day I proposed myself to write something on my Substack, I cannot not write something, so the tossing around continued till I was about to give up.
No good ideas presented themselves.
Stuck, I decided to ask help from my tarot. I decided that I will draw 3 cards and create a story based on them, and funny enough, the cards I drew work great to create a story.
While choosing the cards I said that the first card is someone, a character, who meets the second card, while the third card is the outcome.
The cards I drew:
The judgement, the five of swords and the ten of cups.
The image above is the cards themselves, it is a French deck that is why it says Le Jugement. Don’t judge!
The story I created based on them:
Billy’s Story
Did you ever feel like a visitor in your own life? Like no matter how much you try, how much you work at it, nothing really belongs to you or is a reflection of you?
This is how Billy felt as he was going down the stairs in his office building.
At forty-eight he felt too old for his own activities and he had started to pretend like he was doing things.
For example, when he was supposed to be at the gym, he would actually go in the park, or the shopping centre, depending on the weather, and he would just waste time. He would linger on benches, he would look at the people, he would just will time away as he felt too tired and old to live.
Billy could not remember when he had started to feel like this, when his energy and his drive had started to slowly drain away. What he did know though was that, his days were all the same and he just could not stand them.
What was he to do though? He was too old for anything new, and honestly, he did not think he had it in him to learn anything new.
Outside it was raining. He was not surprised, it had been raining incessantly for more than two weeks. The streets were flooded, the news only talked about floods and more incoming rain.
There was a point when even Ireland felt the rain was a bit too much.
In the past Billy had loved food and one of his favorite activities was planning dinner and cooking it. Now though he did not even like that, to work for I don’t know how much time for food that he ate in ten minutes. So not worth the effort.
Billy was so deep in thought that he did not notice the slim figure peel itself from a wall and come right behind him.
‘Your phone and your wallet.’
Billy was more surprised than anything else. Did he hear right? He turned around.
‘What?’
In the wet darkness, with rain falling, he couldn’t see the face of the man holding a long blade pointed at him.
‘Your money, your phone!’
‘Ohhh’
Without thinking, without conscious intention, Billy grabbed the man’s wrist turned him around and with his tight grip forced him to drop the blade while suffocating him with his arm.
‘Let me go, what are you??’ the man muttered while trying to breathe.
Billy would not have known to answer. He shoved the man forward and stepped onto the shinning blade.
The man did not wait around to see what was going to happen next, he just ran away without looking back.
Billy was left there a bit wobbly and shaken.
‘Are you ok? I called the Gardai! My God, you were so brave!’
He looked at her but did not seem able to recognize her.
‘Billy, can you hear me? Its me, Muireann from HR.’
‘Oh yes … thank you! I am fine …’ he was not, but bit by bit he was coming back to himself.
‘Where did you learn that? You were like a ninja!’
That made him smile, and he looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time.
‘I honestly don’t know … I did some judo when I was a child but it was just like four or five lessons, I cannot believe I still remember that!’
‘Well, you looked like a pro to me! You need to teach me that!’
He laughed for the first time in a long time. Him, a judo instructor? Now that was just ridiculous.
The Gardai took his statement, they took her statement, they took the blade away and that was it. The event that changed his life was nothing but ‘sadly, a usual occurrence’.
The next day in work everybody knew what happened, Muireann had taken care of that. All the excitement made Billy actually think more about where that knowledge he did not know he had came from.
In the next weeks he kept researching judo and finally found the courage to join a class. At the end of it he was tired and exhilarated. He had found something he loved.
Muireann wasn’t joking. She kept at it until they setup a judo class in the work gym where he taught his colleagues some simple self defense moves. Their appreciation, and the fact that they looked up to him for something he did well, made Billy unexpectedly happy.
He honestly had no idea other people mattered to him that much.
Go figure.
So yeah … this is the story that tarot gave us!
I really hope you like it!