Radical Honesty

The woman twisted the handkerchief around. She never revealed the object beneath its surface, but she spun it and arranged it again and again and though I tried to ignore it, I found that my eyes continued to flick down before flickering up to meet her once more.

"You see the world through an interesting lens," she told me, "You view it like a chain reaction, one thing sets off the other until you wind up where you are. It's like dominoes to you, isn't it?"

"Science tells us," I explained to her, "That every action has-"

"Words of another mind once more. Not your own words and not your own thought. Do you have any words that are your own?"

I nodded, spoke bluntly, "I fucked up in college. First year. Right out the gate. Took the one shot I had and messed it all up."

Her head cocked to one side, she wasn't buying a word of it but she was going to let me talk until I'd buried myself if that was what I wanted.

"I swore when I went off to college that things would be different. I'd make the choices that I wanted to make. I'd do the things that I wanted to do and make connections with people and be better.

"And then by the middle of the first year I'd wound up right where people told me to be. Dropped my major for something practical and ignored and cut nearly everyone out of my life, telling myself that I was focusing on school when in truth I was just focusing on being anywhere but out where it was hard."

"Hard?" she asked, seeking clarification.

"Hard to be someone else, to be someone other than what I'd been up until then. It's... Even now it's hard to explain. It's all expectations and payouts and all the rest of it. None of it is real."

The woman smiled at that, "And that might be the first real thing you've said since you walked in here."

"Well then while I'm saying things that are real I guess I'm going to go ahead and ask what exactly this is? What are you doing here? What is this place? Is it... Is it real?"

"As real as you are," She laughed, her voice tinkling like windchimes, "As real as the fair beyond my door and the city beyond those boundaries. As real as you want it to be."

"I don't think that's an answer," I countered, but she just shrugged, "It might be close to an answer but it falls a little short."

I waited, but she gave no response other than indifference.

"Fine then," I went on, "Then tell me what it is that you're offering here. You can do that at least, right? I mean you've set up a tent and everyone who sets up a tent in this fair offers either goods or services. So what do you offer? Do you tell my fortune?"

Her head shook slowly, making it clear that she wanted absolute certainty from me, "No one can tell the future."

"So what do you do then? Tell the past? Is this some kind of odd sort of therapy? Are you supposed to help me?"

"I can help you, if you want to be helped," she said slowly, carefully, "The question is how do you want to be helped?"

I thought about it. I thought about what she said before, about the fact that things weren't necessarily unchangeable. How fortunes were not set in stone and how the future was mine to take control of. With a firm grasp and a hopeful mind, I could still turn my life around. It wasn’t too late.

Not one single part of me believed that.

"This was a dumb mistake," I said, sitting up in the chair and grabbing the arms and almost pushing myself to my feet, "I should go."

"What do you want?" she asked me, "What would make you happy?"

My laugh was bitter, "Happiness is out of reach for me, I'm just not fortunate like that. You can't offer it to me, no one can. It would take a miracle. It would take reaching back and flipping things. It would take a second chance."

She plucked at the handkerchief, drawing it up and dangling it at the edges of what lay beneath.

"A second chance it is then," she said.

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