The Palm Reader's Prescription

Mara had been moving through her days like a zombie for three years before she found herself sitting across from Madame Vera, her palm extended, waiting for answers that couldn't be found in a spreadsheet.

"You're exhausted," Vera said, tracing the life line with a nail bitten to the quick. "But not physically. This is something else."

Outside, the Los Angeles heat pressed against the storefront window. Palm trees swayed in the smog-thick air. Mara had taken her lunch break to come here, leaving her phone unanswered, her unread emails piling up like snowdrifts.

"What do you see?" Mara asked. She'd started seeing a therapist in January. Started taking a multivitamin with iron, B12, something about adrenal fatigue. None of it helped.

Vera turned Mara's hand over, examined the fingers. "You're living someone else's life. The hat—it doesn't fit."

Mara laughed, surprised. She'd started wearing wide-brimmed hats to work after her mother died, a way to hide her face when she didn't want to perform. Her colleagues called it her signature look. Her ex-husband had called it eccentric.

"It's just a hat."

"Nothing is just anything," Vera said sharply. "Your mother—she loved you, but she wanted you to be someone else. You've been trying to be her for seven months."

Mara pulled her hand back. Outside, a car alarm began to wail.

"So what's the cure?" she asked, not believing any of this, suddenly desperate to believe all of it. "Another vitamin? Another prescription?"

Vera closed her eyes. When she opened them, something like kindness softened her face.

"Take off the hat. Call in sick tomorrow. Go somewhere you've never been. Stop waiting for permission to exist."

Mara walked out into the bright California afternoon. She could feel the sweat on her palms, the tightness in her chest. Her phone buzzed in her pocket—an email from her boss, a meeting request she'd been dreading for weeks.

She kept walking. She didn't go back to the office. She didn't call in. She bought a ticket to Mexico City that night, and for the first time in years, she wasn't moving through anything at all.

She was finally moving toward.