Nonetheless, I find myself consistently falling in a sort of platonic (or sometimes not) love with people born anywhere between 15 and 30 June, and I have given up trying to understand why. It’s imperfect, based on a million different cooks in the kitchen, and like anything else, if you choose to believe in it you’ll find something to justify that and if you don’t, you’ll have plenty of evidence to back up your case. If you’re not into astrology, I have another piece of advice: some of it is spot on. If you’re into astrology, I have but one piece of advice: most of it is rubbish. So, astrology is a whole bunch of ingredients thrown into the pot which makes your own personal soup, and it’s far from the only thing stewing away in there. I also learned that inevitably, I am drawn to and find that some of my closest friends seem to cluster around a certain period of time that astrology likes to call the cusp of magic. I still don’t know how true it all is, or if that even matters, but what I do know is that over time I learned how to read and interpret astrological charts so well that I turned it into a job myself at certain points, though now I mostly reserve it for friends and family as a birthday gift. I can’t say that I made my fortune working on that corner of West 8th street, but it paid for me to get back on the railroad and home to Long Island before anyone started asking questions. If they went inside of the shop I got two dollars if they sat for a reading I got five. I would stop people on the corner and say, “Libra!” - it would often fail but every so often I’d hit the mark and pique their interest. She might not have been psychic, but she was right about me: after a few weeks of bluffing on the street corner, I could tell by the way someone walked if they were a Sagittarius or a Taurus, and I could see the unmistakable forehead crease of an Aries from down the block. It was, and remains, a lot more interesting than calculus. The canvas upon which our lives would be drawn. So during those years that I should have been studying for exams and applying to universities, instead I sat at her small table and listened for hours about how the stars and planets were in constant motion and whenever it was that we made our entrance onto the mortal coil, that exact alignment would indelibly mark each one of us like a celestial fingerprint. She said, “you’ll read them too, and you’ll convince them.” I was no more than 15 so the prospect of anyone offering me a job was exciting, even if I had no idea what it was that I was supposed to do. She could read people’s astrological chart and tell them who they really were. She was a reader: not a fortune teller and not a psychic (those don’t exist, she insisted time and again). I would have to stand outside of that storefront and get customers for her, hyping the mystical wares she offered on the other side of the glass. When I did finally speak to her, she asked me if I needed to make some spare cash and offered me a job. I wouldn’t know until many years later what that symbol meant, and I would pass by her storefront a hundred times before I spoke to her. During those days, I used to pass by a small storefront where a woman would sit in the window day in, and day out, under a glowing neon sign that was twisted into the image of a hand with an eye in the middle of it. Recently, I’ve thought quite a lot about one of the very first jobs that I had, when I should have been in school but was instead spending most of my time hanging out in the East Village in New York trying to look and act older than I was.
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