In Manhattan, a psychic tells me I’m going to live until I’m ninety. I thank her and shake her smooth hand that thumbs my palm that she’s just read like a foreign language. I pay my forty dollars and leave. Outside is dark and hot. I light a cigarette and note how my nails have become dirty—thin black lines curved along my nail beds. A restaurant blares Puerto Rican dance music, and couples pass by lone, headphone-wearing women who drift as seaweed does.

      I walk in the direction it seems other people are walking in, tracing familiar shapes into the palm the psychic held. Since I moved to New York, I have spent a lot of time alone in public. Even the people I speak with seem to be talking to themselves through me. Last week, a barista told me, I forgot to feed my cat, and I judged her thickly made-up eyes and thought how vain she must be for remembering to line her eyes but not feed her pet. A man on the subway told me my hair reminded him of Stevie Nicks. I said, Do I look like Stevie Nicks to you? and he said, No, and plucked a crumb from his beard.

      When I moved to Brooklyn, my coworkers all balked at my being so far removed from the Village and high-end cocktail lounges they all frequented. Though the office where I wrote for a culture magazine was an hour away, I liked the long subway ride. I thought I might have a romantic venture with a Michael Klein-clad businessman who’d sit across from me on the 4 train every morning. We’d sneak glances at each other for a few months. I’d catalogue which suits he wore most often. Eventually, something would happen—a string quartet would storm the car, or a couple would have a loud, public breakup—and we would look to each other and laugh and introduce. We’d cook steak at his loft and take walks in Central Park.

      But the man who said I didn’t look like Stevie Nicks went back to playing on his iPhone, and I went back to staring through the windows as the blurry dark gave way to bright flashes of passing trains.

      As I walk through the city-humid night, I think about what the psychic told me. She said she saw me on the West Coast, and that I’m seeing someone new, and that there is a blockage in my energy keeping me from truly connecting to this new person, and that an energy cleansing takes twenty-four hours and is usually three hundred dollars, but for me she would make it two. I’m not seeing anyone, new or old, but maybe that’s because my blocked energy is preventing me from meeting them. The psychic was probably a fake, but when she looked at me and said, You don’t know who to let in, I felt like crying. It felt like she could see me. I don’t think you’re allowed to be friends with your psychic, but I wondered what her friends are like.