Nonfiction Honorable Mention, 2021 Doro Böhme Memorial Contest

My life as an online psychic was short–lived. Its truncated nature was likely due to the fact that I was thirteen and not psychic. My reasons for fortune-telling had nothing to do with monetization. I saw meddling in the lives of others as a form of entertainment, and “Clairvoyant” sounded witchy and mysterious—two things I longed to be.

I attached myself to anything and everything different from the dry swath of prairie that surrounded me. Around the age of six, I made up a fictional set of parents who lived in China and was adamant that they were my real family. I’m not sure I understood where China was, but it seemed like it might be the opposite of where I lived. I felt the only things I had access to were rolling hills, rattlesnakes, and coyotes. That all changed when the Internet sailed across the feathery sea of buffalo grass that surrounded our house, strolled down our cracked sidewalk, and gave me a taste of the rest of the world.

My father had no real need for a computer in the mid-nineties, but want almost always overshadowed need for him. He’d thumbed through several thick cardstock brochures with his cracked bear paws, mulling over processor speeds and memory specs before settling on a Gateway. Our first PC arrived in a sizable cardboard box. It must have weighed thirty or forty pounds. The entire package was decorated in cow print—a fitting aesthetic for my childhood home on the range where the buffalo did roam. My father dove into the box, eager to play with all the components. Screeching sounds of Styrofoam sliding against the tight container shot through the house as small white chunks of packing debris floated to the carpet like snow on a forest floor. The small room off the kitchen became known, forevermore, as “the computer room.”

The machine was blocky, beige, and big—like unflattering underwear. It may have lacked aesthetic appeal, but it did come with an America Online disc advertising, “250 free hours!” That was all I needed—my unofficial song of the year became, “EE urrrr EEEE urrr INNNGGGG KRRRR.”

Back then, your computer would plug into a landline, which everyone had because hardly anyone had a cell phone. Most of us were not tech-savvy, but even if we could have figured out how to put a photo on the web, it would likely have taken an hour to upload. In those days, dial-up speeds ranged from slug to sloth. Most of the 100,000 websites in existence at that time were about as interesting to me as reading IKEA instructions on the installation of a closet organizer.

Chatrooms served as a source of attention at a time when I had very little and craved more. Talking to a stranger in Russia, a woman from Florida, or a man in London made me feel like I had a place in the world. Naturally, most people used chatrooms to flirt with each other and share information about themselves, regardless of whether or not it was true. There were no profile pictures. You couldn’t google someone, even if they had given you their real name, because Google hadn’t been invented yet. I needed to believe YoMommaJokesNYC really was a radio DJ in Manhattan. I didn’t want to know he might be a sixteen-year- old with Dorito streaks and cum stains crusted to his sweatpants. I enjoyed the fantasy.

I swiveled around in my family’s padded office chair, chatting with men about parties I had never attended and cities I had never visited. I created personas and physical descriptions to suit whomever I was talking to at the time.

What do you look like?

I’m five foot seven with long legs.

I am five two and this is the only time my legs have ever been referred to as long.

Tell me more.

I have jet black hair.

Another lie. I went through a multi-year phase of wishing I was Italian and black hair sounded très Italiano.

What do you and your friends like to do for fun?

Clubbing mostly. Sometimes we go to warehouse raves.

I was pretending to be Angelina Jolie’s character from Hackers.

You sound like you know where to party. We should meet up.

Totally. Hit me up the next time you’re in New York. Gotta run, ciao.

I don’t remember when or why I decided to set up a psychic chatroom, but I did, and it quickly occupied my after-school hours. I waited patiently, day after day, for people to log in and ask me questions about their lives and, somewhat to my surprise, they did.

I bought into the old trope of how a psychic should look or speak. I typed in broken syntax; I misspelled words. I wanted to make myself seem more like a fifty-year-old Eastern European woman than a bored  youth  surrounded  by miles of prairie. I wanted my “clients” to envision dusty scarves and tapestries strewn about my house, not overhead lighting and floral wallpaper borders. I was always positive and somewhat ambiguous in my readings with clients. I had to be positive, not only because I wanted people to like me but because I genuinely wanted people to feel like everything would be alright. Occasionally, coincidence worked in my favor, and my prediction would be accurate.

What knowledge do you seek?

My boyfriend broke up with me yesterday and I want to know if we will get back together.

Okay. Now I will look.

This is where I would pause long enough to make it seem as though I was doing something magical or important.

I am seeing a phone.

What does that mean?

It is phone. A yellow phone. You have phone, yes?

Does it mean he’s going to call?

That is possible. (It’s important to be vague when you lack skill.)

Will we get back together?

All I see is phone. Yellow phone.

When will he call??

Soon. In future, but soon.

Will we make up?

This . . . I cannot say. Wait for the phone call and you will get answer. I must go now.

I didn’t need to go, but I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. I believed—solely because I’d seen this in too many movies—that a man could do something rash or cruel, apologize with a grand gesture, and his wife or girlfriend would forgive him. Her ex-boyfriend calling felt like a natural next step in their relationship, even though I knew nothing about either of them.

She and I only spoke once more.

You were right!! He called!!

My young mind began to wonder if maybe I really was psychic.

Most of my clients logged off and never returned after I’d given my reading. A few months later, I did too. Fourteen was the legal driving age in South Dakota, and I no longer needed the Internet to try to connect with people. I was able to drive myself to other humans and offer them advice in person. It was easier for me to counsel someone else than to look at my own life, though I’m unsure why I thought I had any great insights into life.

Around the time I was peering into my digital crystal ball, the school counselor came into my classroom to introduce herself. She asked each student to fill out questionnaires about themselves and describe how they might use the school’s guidance services. I wrote my name on the questionnaire and included the following sentence:

I don’t like talking about my feelings, so you’ll probably never see me.

How desperate I was to  be noticed.  I struggled to cope  with  my  father’s chemical addictions and the middle-of-the-night fights between him and my mother—though I intentionally gave the opposite impression to anyone who came within spitting distance. I never went to the counselor’s office, and she never came looking for me. My attempt at getting her attention by acting as though  I  didn’t  want  to  talk  didn’t  work.  Not  communicating  my  needs  had never worked in my favor, yet, it was a behavior I continued until my thirties.

I can’t imagine I would have told her the truth if she had asked how I was feeling. I was afraid my mother would be angry with me for talking to others about her fights with my father. She was, and is, an incredibly private person— airing dirty laundry wasn’t something we were allowed to do. I knew something was wrong, but I thought something was wrong with me, not the situation.

I was afraid of what the counselor would think if she knew I heated a metal fork with a cheap, plastic lighter and held it to my forearm under the stairs in our basement. The burns were always superficial. My skin would erase all evidence within a week. I burned myself for attention, not because I enjoyed the physical sensation. I made the marks in easily visible spots, then hid them with long sleeves so no one would notice them.

I recently came across an article that outlined various coping mechanisms. The essence of the piece was as follows.

There are healthy coping mechanisms:

Exercising

I exercised plenty in my youth, though my obsession with thinness may have significantly diminished its positive effects.

Playing an instrument

I signed up to learn percussion in sixth grade but was given a tenor saxophone instead. Finding it difficult and somewhat embarrassing to lug around, I quit after a year or two.

Meditating

I assumed this was only done by monks in Tibet.

Talking with someone you trust

The teenagers I knew did not give trustworthy advice. Some of them thought a Ziplock bag could double as a condom.

Then there are unhealthy coping mechanisms:

Drug use

I never paid for drugs, but I didn’t turn away free ones.

Alcohol abuse

Yes.

Cigarette smoking

I enjoyed cigarettes well into my thirties.

Self-injury

Briefly, but yes.

This information swept away a great deal of confusion surrounding my thoughts and actions as a young person. The explanations feel impossibly simple now, but only because of advances in society and access to information. I didn’t know how to cope in the nineties. I think most people didn’t know how to process their trauma or their emotions. Ignorance does not always spare us from effect. I had not heard of the terms patriarchy or self-care, though the existence of one and lack of the other affected me nonetheless.

Looking back, I wonder how that computer affected the rest of my family. How did they spend their time online? I never thought to ask. I doubt any of them rattled off fortunes to strangers, but maybe they had fantasy lives as well. A lot of people did. A lot of people still do. I think we all discover—or uncover— parts of ourselves online.

My life fell into a time where I was able to experience humanity both before and after the invention of the World Wide Web. My ability to access information online changed my life far more than tenuous and fraudulent connections in chatrooms. Yet, those chatrooms were where I laid the footings for a bridge to self-discovery. The versions of myself I created while spinning around in that office chair, however dishonest they may have been, served as a warm-up to telling the truth. I’m not a psychic. I don’t have sleek, raven hair. I no longer pretend to be someone I am not. I am an artist and a writer. I do not fully know who I am, and I don’t have a crystal ball to tell me the future, but I can look back on my life with empathy. I can accept who I was and who I am without shame, and I think my younger self would be proud of who she became.

Sarah Sloane is a writer and photographer who holds an MA from Spalding University’s School of Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in the Louisville Eccentric Observer and Lupercalia Press. She lives and writes in Seattle with her wife and two dogs, though her whereabouts require regular verification. Sarah is now accepting invitations to go swimming in beautiful locations worldwide.

SPOT IMAGES CREATED BY WARINGA HUNJA

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