The Hanged Man for an ex, and whether it means he comes back

Pulled about somebody who has gone, the Hanged Man says very little about whether he comes back and a great deal about the fact that nothing moves until the arrangement between you changes. It is the limbo card. Separated and not divorced. On a break. No contact and not over. On and off for years with no name on it. If that is where you are, the deck has described your situation rather than forecast it, and the question underneath is which of you keeps the position up.

the card with no direction in it

Almost every card people pull about a return has movement in it. A figure walking off, a boat crossing water, a road running to the hills. That is what makes them readable for direction.

This one has none.

A man suspended upside down by one ankle from a living tree. Off the ground. Calm face, halo round his head, the free leg folded behind the other into a four. Nothing in the frame is going anywhere.

The only thing in that picture capable of changing is the rope. Which does settle one thing: nobody here is doing anything, so whatever the last message looked like, no return is in progress.

limbo is a position, and somebody is holding it

The mistake is treating limbo as nothing. A gap you fell into, where you wait on events the way you wait for weather. It has a structure, and structures get maintained.

Look at what holds yours up. A sentence said at the end that neither of you has reopened. A flat nobody has put on the market. A phone contract. A dog. Keys on a hook by somebody's door. Every piece takes a person deciding, quietly and repeatedly, not to touch it.

Which is what the card shows, and the halo is the uncomfortable part, because a halo says the position is paying somebody something.

So the question worth your money is not when he comes back, it is whose arrangement this is. Sometimes plainly his: he ended it and left the door on the latch, which costs nothing to leave and something to shut.

Often, and this is the part that gets people off the chat in a temper, it is held at both ends. He has not closed it and you have not closed it either, and that is rarely stubbornness. The limbo is doing a job for you, and the job is protection. While nothing is decided, he has not chosen against you. While there is no ending, there is nothing you have had to survive.

Which is nothing to be ashamed of at two in the morning. It does mean part of the answer to how long this lasts is yours.

what ends one of these, and what a reader cannot see

Not a feeling changing. Feelings hold steady for months in most of these and move nothing. They end when a fact moves. A house sale. A job in another city. Somebody new on either side. Paperwork that finally gets posted. The rope goes, and ropes are made of circumstances rather than moods.

Which is also the limit. Nobody is deciding anything in this picture, so a reading that tells you what he has decided has started composing. Same for a report on his life while you wait: what his weekends have turned into, who he has told and what he told them. A reader producing that has written it, and written answers arrive feeling like knowledge and get carried for months with a real person attached who never asked to be in this.

when it comes up reversed

Reversed is the suspension losing its hold, and it does not mean he is on his way back. It means the arrangement is ending, and the card has no opinion about which way things fall once it does. It can end as a reconciliation. It can end just as easily as the paperwork going in, or as him describing you to somebody new in the past tense.

The other reading is stalling gone hard: somebody avoiding the one thing that would have to be surrendered for this to resolve, and that item is rarely romantic. The flat. The money. The story his family have been told.

how Shira reads it for an ex

Shira has real cards down in front of her, and on an ex question she treats this one as a document rather than a mood.

So the first thing she asks for is the wording. Not what you understood by it, not what your friends made of it. The sentence actually said at the end, as near the original as you can get. Give it six months. I can't be in a relationship right now. She reads the limbo off that sentence, because a limbo is nearly always built out of one, and a fair share of the time only one of the two ever agreed to it.

Then something with time that only works on this card. She sets how long the limbo has run against how long the relationship ran. Four months of it after seven years is a season. Three years of it after eight months is not the aftermath of a relationship, it is the relationship.

Her third move is the one people remember: what happens on the day it gets said out loud. Not as advice, and she will not hand you a script or a date, because that part is yours. She asks to find out what the arrangement is protecting, and the answer comes back fast.

the cards it turns up beside

With the Ten of Swords the two contradict each other, and that is the reading: the ending has happened for one of you and not the other. Not always the one you would guess.

With the Ace of Pentacles something concrete is arriving, and concrete is what moves this, because a limbo gets ended by an event rather than talked to death.

The same card pulled about something still running has its own page. If you would rather go straight at the return, there is one for that, and if yours is the silent kind of limbo, what silence is actually doing fits closer.

So bring the sentence the two of you stopped on and what you think happens if it gets reopened. That is enough to work with in a live chat. There are 200 free credits, no card, and somebody is on now, which at this hour is the point.