Lines We Cross

The fortune teller traced the lines on my palm with surprisingly rough fingers, like sandpaper dragging across silk. 'You're running from something,' she said, her voice cracking with age and too many cigarettes. 'Or toward something. The lines don't distinguish.' I almost laughed. Three weeks after Sarah moved out, I was still running — early morning jogs that left my lungs burning, desperate enough to outrun the empty spaces in our apartment. The goldfish we'd won at that carnival two years ago floated belly-up in its bowl yesterday. I'd flushed it without calling her, which felt like its own kind of betrayal.

'Your life line is fragmented,' the old woman continued, her nails chipped with navy polish. 'Like something broke it and it tried to heal crooked.' Outside her cramped storefront, through rain-streaked glass, I could see the baseball field where I'd played catch with my father every Sunday until the divorce. Twenty years later, I still couldn't watch a game without remembering the sound of a ball hitting leather and my mother crying in the kitchen.

Sarah had left because I couldn't choose. Not between her and someone else, but between staying present in my own life and perpetually bracing for loss. The palm reader pressed her thumb into my hand, harder now, pressing into the tissue beneath the skin. 'You can't keep running,' she said. 'Eventually you run out of road.' I thought about Sarah's key still on my ring, about the goldfish's bright orange scales turning dull, about how my father never came back to that baseball field.

'What if I don't know what I'm running toward?' I asked, and she looked at me with eyes like faded marbles. 'Then you run until you do,' she said. 'Or you stop and let whatever's chasing you catch up.' That night, I stopped running. I called Sarah. I bought a new goldfish. I drove to the old baseball field and sat on the bleachers until sunrise. The palm reader was wrong about one thing: my life line hadn't fragmented. It had simply changed direction.