The Palm Reader's Diagnosis

The first thing Dr. Chen noticed about Maya was that she didn't walk into his office—she shambled. Dark circles pooled beneath her eyes like bruises, her movements had the jerky quality of a stop-motion film, and when she spoke, her voice was a hollow echo of itself. In other words, she was a thirty-two-year-old zombie, though not the flesh-eating kind. The corporate kind. The kind that died slowly under fluorescent lights while answering emails at 11 PM on a Tuesday.

"You're going to live," Chen said, not looking up from his clipboard. "But you might want to consider not living this way."

Maya blinked slowly. "That's your diagnosis?"

"That's my observation." He finally met her eyes. "Give me your palm."

She hesitated, then extended her right hand. Chen turned it over, studying the lines as if they contained the meaning she'd been searching for since grad school. His thumb traced the life line, heart line, head line—each one a roadmap of choices made and unmade.

"Your friend Sarah called me," he said softly. "She's worried about you. Said you haven't taken a vacation in three years. Said you forgot your own niece's birthday last week because you were on a conference call."

Maya pulled her hand back. "Sarah talks too much."

"Sarah loves you. There's a difference."

She looked away, out the window where palm trees swayed against a perfect blue California sky. She used to love those palms, their ridiculous tropical optimism in the middle of a concrete city. Now they just reminded her of the life she was supposed to be living—the one where she had time to notice things like trees.

"What did my palm say?" she asked, trying for sarcasm but landing somewhere near exhausted.

Chen leaned back in his chair. "It said you're not a zombie, Maya. You're just tired. And the difference is that tired people can get better."

For the first time in months, something cracked open in her chest. "That sounds suspiciously like hope."

"It's a medical diagnosis," he smiled. "Prescribed: two weeks off, minimum. Call Sarah. Maybe look at those palm trees from somewhere other than your office window."

Maya stood up, and though she still felt dead on her feet, something—small, fragile, but unmistakably alive—stirred somewhere inside her exhausted heart.