Psychic Telephone · 10

Explainable

I’ve never had the kinds of moments my sister describes, with flashes of imagery coming off someone else’s body. Nor do I see anything, as my cousin does, when I close my eyes and look in your direction. But in the months after the massage therapist Bea told me I was psychic, as I more closely observed what I felt in my body, I began to notice that I tended to avoid certain people. And that I avoided them based on a feeling I got when I was near them. A feeling I could describe as uncomfortable and a little bit frantic, so that I found myself trying to scoot away as soon as possible. None of this was conscious, though, and it happened so naturally that it was more like I simply bounced off some people.

The first person I identified as a source of this feeling was a coworker at my office, an older woman on the sales staff who always looked bright and professional with her sleek blond hair and matching suits. But there was something about her, something I couldn’t pinpoint, that made me feel suddenly panicked when she spoke to me. Eventually I realized I could tell that the feelings she presented were not the ones she felt inside—to the degree that it seemed as if the person she claimed to be was not who she actually was. I couldn’t say in what way exactly, or how it played out in her life, but every time I saw her, there was some sense in which I knew she was a fake, a phony, a pretender.

Diffraction Film, 2024, by Danielle Ezzo

That was the kind of thing, I discovered, that I reacted to most strongly. Not so much the anxious pretenses of a striver, or someone who’s trying hard to fit in—that was easy to spot, but it didn’t freak me out. What I mean is something colder: the dissonance that hovers in the air around a liar, or a person who’s hiding something dark. And while I could never fully identify what was being hidden, I started to get more sure of what I sensed. Over time, it came to feel normal. These days, rather than avoid such people, I find myself watching them closely, trying to get at the core of their dissonance.

I had a moment like this just last week, with the hostess at a restaurant. Will stood beside me, unaware, while I felt blasted so hard by her vibe that I actually took a step back. Just being near her stressed me out, yet at the same time I couldn’t stop staring at her, waiting for something to happen. That’s how it tends to play out all these years later. And while I can’t usually come up with much detail, I do speculate. Sitting at the table, I had the thought that what I felt on her was something like domestic violence. Something like a manipulative, controlling partner—one she broke up with, maybe, not too long ago. And while I have no way of knowing if I was right, I find I’m rarely surprised when people share their secrets or vulnerabilities with me. Often there’s a sense that I knew it was coming.

To be clear, I don’t suppose this is something other people can’t do. I seem to do it more naturally, and maybe more easily, than most. But none of it—at least none of what I have experienced myself—appears to require a supernatural explanation. The more I think about it, the more it just seems ordinary. Explainable. Perhaps not even particularly rare. It makes sense, I think, to be able to know things about the person who’s standing in front of you. Even if you don’t know how you know.

But I also think it’s interesting that there is so little vocabulary, and not much of a discourse, about this kind of thing. It’s striking, and revealing, that I couldn’t identify or name my own experience until someone called it “psychic.” For my part, I’ve long thought of it as intuition. Still, I’m left wondering: What constitutes intuition? Is that all there is to it? How might it be explained? And also: Why this gap in our own self-awareness, about something so omnipresent in our lives? Why was it only on the fringes that I found people who understood?