The Hermit for an ex, and whether the silence means he is coming back

The Hermit pulled about an ex says three things, and they have to be said together or each one turns into a lie. It describes a real inward turn rather than a punishment aimed at you. It contains a descent, because nobody stays on a summit. And it carries no timeline whatsoever, which is the thing you came here for.

Take any one on its own and you get the reading the internet gives, where he is processing and will be back by spring. Comfortable, and not what the card says.

a summit is not a house

Look at where he is standing.

It is a peak. Bare rock, night, no shelter in the frame, and he climbed to get there. Nowhere on it is somewhere a person stays. So the descent is not optimism read into the card, it is what the ground is for, and the only good news here rests on it.

He is the ninth card, one short of ten, near the end of a count rather than the start of one. Whatever this is, it is late in its own process.

Then the part that gets skipped. He carries a lamp and a stick, and that is the entire inventory. Nothing of anyone else is in his hands, no token, no letter, nothing brought up from the life at the bottom of the hill. People read this as a man alone with his thoughts about her, and nothing in the image supports the last three words of that sentence.

what the silence was actually about

If the Hermit turned up when you asked what happened, the answer it gives is unglamorous and, in its own way, a relief.

It says the retreat was about his own life. Not about someone new, not about a verdict passed on you in the weeks before he went, not about anything withheld to make a point. There is no second figure anywhere in that card to have been chosen over you, and no message being sent.

That takes the worst version off the table, and it should. Then it hands you something nearly as hard, which is that nothing is being sent at all. A silence you have read nightly as a communication turns out to have no sender, and everything you decoded since he stopped was your own work.

coming down, and where

Here is the sentence this card is most often used to avoid.

A descent is in the picture. Your address is not.

He comes down, because that is what the card is doing and what people do. What he comes down to is a separate question with a separate card behind it, and plenty of endings have a man finishing a long quiet and carrying on somewhere you are not in. The Hermit is silent about that, and a reading that slides from the first to the second has stopped reading and started reassuring.

The other thing it will not do is date any of it, and the reason is in his hand. That lantern lights about a pace of ground. He can see the next step and nothing past it, so he does not know when he is finished either, and nobody can be read for a decision they have not reached. Which is why the timing question comes back empty however it is asked, and why a pace is the honest thing to give you.

when it comes up reversed

Reversed, the shape holds and the purpose has gone. Someone went up to think, stopped a long while ago, and stayed, because coming back means answering for the months. That is where waiting costs you most, since there is no process left to wait out.

It can also mean the solitude was never quite what it was described as. Rarely anything dramatic. Usually the reason he gave was the tidiest available rather than the true one.

how Gillian reads it for an ex

Gillian will not give you a month, and she says so in the first minute rather than the last, on the view that you paid for an answer and the refusal is part of it.

Before she reads anything she takes one question off you. When he went quiet, did he go quiet with everybody or only with you. She wants what you already knew before you ever opened a deck, never anything you would have to go and find out, and she is firm about it. If the quiet was general, the card is describing exactly what it says. If it was only ever pointed at you, this is the wrong card for what happened and she will go and get the right one, because a silence with an aim in it is a different object.

Her second move is to swap the question. Not when, but what would have to be true. The card has no clock and it does have a condition, since a man comes down when whatever he went up for is done. So she asks what you think he went up for, and listens for whether the answer is about him or about you. When it comes back as me, she says so plainly, because that is the one answer the picture will not carry.

And she will not run the line about him processing and coming back to you. Half of it is true, which is what makes it so easy to say and so expensive to believe.

the cards it comes down with

With the Five of Cups you get the same cloaked figure twice, head bowed both times, and the difference between them is the whole reading. The Five of Cups looks down at what spilled. The Hermit looks at the path. One of those is regret and the other is not, and a reader should tell you which turned up.

Beside Judgement the picture changes most. That card is about being called, and next to the Hermit it says what brings a man down off a hill is usually something summoning him rather than something he worked out.

Where the relationship is still going, this card is answering something else, and there is a separate page for that.

So it is kinder than you feared about what the silence meant and harder than you hoped about what comes next. If you have been running it as a countdown, another pull will not help. Saying the whole thing to somebody does, the eighteen months answer included, and a chat is open at any hour.