with great detail. Now, if it’s linked to the Moon in your chart, it shows a special capacity to transcend normal limitations. Because the Moon is a personal planet and rules the senses when it is attached to Neptune, the visions receive emotional magnification, giving them the strength to leave the material world and enter another plane. The visions are elevated and become the material world’s future. What is at first a part of the imagination becomes reality with this mental projection power. Some people experience this only during their childhood, but for others it remains dormant until activated. Some people believe that psychic abilities can be activated or enhanced through the study and practice of meditation and hypnosis.”
Hypnosis? So it wasn’t just for weight loss and smoking. Memphis bit her bottom lip; this was quite a coincidence.
“The next planet is Pluto. It probes and rules Scorpio and the eighth house. It goes below the surface and gives you the understanding of powerful thoughts. Thoughts are actually tangible. If practiced often, one can construct a thought and make it come into being, overcoming the laws of the material world and entering the surface, changing the working machine.”
Memphis had been watching for a few minutes when it hit her: he was completely spot on when it came to Jonathan’s reading! She tried to recall what he said about the actor with the same birth date. He had a great deal of secrets—another side to his personality. Well, that was an understatement. Jonathan was leading a completely different life from the one he created so carefully on his public calendar. She took more of an interest in the show. She listened intently to the host, Virgil. She repeated his name softly as she grabbed a pad and pen from the end table beside the sofa.
On Gemma’s Hello Kitty stationery pad, she began to take notes on how to complete your own birth chart. This time she would do one on herself. With her birthday falling on December 12, she was a “fire sign.” Memphis wrote the letters smaller than usual. She wished she had invisible ink. It was almost embarrassing writing down terms such as love sign compatibility and zodiac color, but after the incident with Jonathan, she needed all the information she could get to avoid pushing another lover out of the closet. As the show ended, Virgil supplied the audience with his e-mail address for inquires and personal chart readings. She probably couldn’t afford him; she would have to go this alone. She just needed her birth time to begin.
She turned off the television as the credits rolled. She went to her room and took out a box from under her bed. It was made of cherry wood and had the letter “M” inscribed in ivory. It was the only thing besides her looks that she could confidently say her parents gave her. She opened the gold latch and took out a necklace, a stack of papers, and a rock. She sighed; her legacy was a rock.
She started sifting through the papers for her birth certificate when she realized that the one she had wouldn’t be accurate. They never found her parents, so they never knew her actual place of birth. The certificate that they found with her just had her name and birth date. What a strange thing to leave with a six-year-old. But then again, who would abandon a child in the first place? Her race nor her nationality was listed on her birth certificate. People often assumed she was Hispanic because of her long, curly hair and olive skin, but she didn’t speak Spanish. She had a bit of an accent until her foster mother steadily slapped her round vowels off her tongue.
Only in college, when a professor offered to complete DNA testing for her, did she discover that she was actually black. She never based her identity on her race, but her boyfriend at the time did; he enjoyed telling racist jokes whenever he drank too much. They broke up shortly after she received her test results.
She never really looked through the stack of papers that lay in the box. The last time she opened this box was right after her eighteenth birthday. Strangely, her foster parents were instructed to give her the box once she became an adult; it was her first and last Christmas gift from them. She hoped to find pictures or clues as to who her parents were and who she was,