The Fool when the question is about an ex

When the Fool comes out on a question about an ex, the honest answer is that a beginning is live and the card has not said whose. Which sounds like a dodge. It is the most useful sentence on this page, because in a spread about a man who has gone, the beginning very often belongs to the person who did the shuffling.

The card that stands outside the story

Every other Major has a place in an order. The Fool has a zero on it, which is less a position than a refusal to take one, and what it means is that this card does not belong to any sequence that was already running.

Hold on to that, because you brought a sequence. Two and a half years of it, or seven months, an ending you can date to the hour, and an account of what went wrong that you have now said out loud maybe forty times. The Fool appears nowhere in that account. It is drawn as the state before any of it.

Then look at the geography. The figure is walking, bundle bouncing on its stick, dog keeping pace at the ankle. The mountains sit behind him, small with distance. In front there is nothing at all. Air, and a great deal of light.

Almost every difficult card in this deck puts its difficulty in front of the figure or directly on top of him. This one has drawn the hard country as already crossed.

What it means when you asked about an ex

Three readings are honest here, and separating them is most of the work.

It can be his beginning, made with you. That does happen, and it is what everybody is hoping for when they type the question. The tell is that it does not arrive on its own. It lands in a seat you gave him, and something warm and backward-looking turns up next to it.

It can be his beginning made somewhere else. The card carries no name, no face, and nothing whatsoever about where he is or who is near him. A reading that fills that in has stopped reading the card, and the silence there is not the reader being cagey. The picture genuinely does not contain a second person.

Or it is your beginning, arriving in a spread about him. This is the one that gets misheard as him, for the obvious reason that you asked about him. Which is why the seat matters more than the card, and why one card pulled on is he coming back cannot settle any of it.

The part that stings, and the part underneath it

Being told the beginning is yours lands badly for about a week. It sounds like a consolation prize handed over by somebody who did not want to say no.

It is not that. What the Fool describes is openness, and openness is the exact thing people are most afraid the last year took off them. If the card came out on you, then whatever the ending did, it has not closed you. You are still someone capable of starting something. That is not what it feels like at four in the morning, and it is the more reliable of the two pieces of news.

Nothing here is frozen either. No weight on the card, no stuck figure, no wall. Whatever this situation is, the deck is not describing the sealed thing you have been describing to yourself.

Reversed

Reversed on an ex question, the common read is the beginning that never gets taken. The charge for a fresh start sits there and stays up in the air. Which is what an on and off pattern looks like once somebody draws it: two people restarting an intention every few months and neither of them moving a foot.

The second read is a return made with no thought in it. He arrives back the same man, into the same arrangement, and you both call it a fresh start because for a fortnight it feels like one. Sit with that version, because it is the one that looks most like the answer you wanted.

How Vivienne reads it

Vivienne works long on reunion questions, and on this card she starts with which way the figure is facing.

The mountains are behind. The empty air is in the direction of travel. So the card walks into your spread with its back turned to the thing you asked about, and she will put it to you in roughly those words before she says anything comforting.

Then she says what it does not mean, because the sentence only works with both halves. It does not mean the relationship is finished. A painting of a young man in a field holds no opinion on your two and a half years, and she will not dress a picture up as a verdict to give you something firmer to hold.

What the card gives is orientation. Somebody in this reading is facing away from the country the two of you already crossed, and the only question worth asking is which of you it landed on.

Which is why she asks what the day after looks like before she reads the rest of the spread. If you can describe the message arriving in full detail and cannot describe the Tuesday that follows it, the Fool is describing you, and the beginning in it is one you have not let yourself picture yet.

Cards that turn up alongside it

With the Six of Cups the beginning has a memory attached, and the memory is doing most of the talking. Warm, and a memory is still not a plan.

With the Four of Swords or the Eight of Cups, somebody is resting or has walked away, and neither of those is a man packing a bag.

The Star beside it is the pairing people misread most, because two hopeful cards feel like confirmation of each other. Check the seats. Hope on your side and hope on his side are two different readings out of the same two pictures.

If you pulled a single card, that is the thing to fix first, and the three card spread positions will do it. For the wider question rather than the card, there is a reading about an ex and will he come back.