Time Machine: Escalators and Sandals
But never at once!
Attention NYC readers: at last, Yesterday’s Horoscope will return to the stage June 23rd at Caveat in the Lower East Side. Come enjoy the delicious cosmic feast we’ve prepared for Cancer season. There will be an astronomer! A flutist! Quick changes! Choreo!!! See you there! For now, please enjoy this trip to the past!
Xoxo,
The Skies
MAY, 2022
As is well documented, you’re afraid of everything, Virgo. Your brain is always in the throes of calculating all the terrible fates that could befall you. Innocuous situations that most participate in without question, you interrogate mentally at length before ultimately resigning to them due to profound, self-inflicted peer pressure.
For example, you are terrified of escalators. So is your sister. Maybe this isn’t the most ideal first example to give, because this one isn’t necessarily all your fault. Members of your family (sorry to point fingers, but it was your Grandma and Aunt Debbie) painted, in the skies’ opinion, a far too vivid description of what can, apparently, happen if one isn’t careful while riding an escalator.
I admit that from my cosmic seat amidst the heavens I don’t always bother myself with the inner workings of most machines on your planet. But I have to say, their descriptions of assured, merciless violence befalling those foolish enough to ride an escalator complacently is certainly not what I believed a mere escalator capable of inflicting. It’s more so in line with what I would expect from a rogue, sadistic lawnmower.
The bloodied landscape they claimed awaited a non-vigilant escalator rider was learned from the field, according to them. Oh yes, they’d had first hand experiences watching many (many!!!) people get absolutely shredded to pieces—because they were too busy laughing with their precious friends to remember they were on a staircase to execution.
If you are wearing sandals (which in New York isn’t very often, since you usually wear platform boots in the summer to better dodge the roaches you are also afraid of), you excuse yourself out of an escalator situation, as you feel it even likelier your feet will be pulverized into a thousand useless strands, as was foretold by your Grandma and your Aunt Debbie.
Though some of your fears were drilled into your brain from concerned outsiders (was it concern? Was this a decades-long prank? Why did they go so hard about the escalators? Your sister spent an entire trip to Japan finding excuses to take stairs up enormous buildings!), others you’ve concocted all on your own.
Despite your natural inclination to proselytize the absolute worst case scenario no matter what (your husband dies tomorrow because he forgot to put on sunscreen today), you desperately want to move through the world with a more relaxed worldview. You’d welcome a transformation that would take you from your current state (scared to do acupuncture next to the wall in case art hanging on that wall falls down and impales the acupuncture needles deeper into your body), to perhaps someone who can get acupuncture in any part of a room!
This week, a glass will break in your bedroom. I won’t say who broke it, but he’s really sorry. Your instincts tell you that broken glass could still be lurking long after the clean up, hiding in crooks in the wood, plotting your demise. Despite being afraid of absolutely everything (steel wool, for example), you want so deeply to be an easy breezy beautiful cover girl about life’s daily stresses that you pretend that you are fine with your sanctuary being polluted with broken glass.
You try to channel calmness (waste of energy, you’ve never been calm) and barely attempt to facilitate the clean up. You believe that by choosing not to indulge your anxious terror, you’ll prove your fears wrong, and be cured (or become tolerable company). I believe this technique is called exposure therapy, but I’m not sure enough about that to not include a caveat like the end of this sentence.
The following day, you are rewarded for your posturing as a relaxed person by stepping on a piece of broken glass. Thankfully, you’ll be wearing your typical At Home uniform (I’ll spare the readers the more horrifying details of your daily dress and mostly focus on your use of Extra Thick™ socks). Your Extra Thick™ socks behave as a bulletproof vest, and will protect your foot from the worst of the plunging glass’s wrath, but you can expect a light impalement nonetheless.
The impalement, naturally, fills you with rage. You cry as you demand your home medical kit (tweezers and bactine) be brought to you immediately. As you remove the glass shard from your foot, you cry and say I hate that I’m right about everything.
You’re right about very little, but I can appreciate the sentiment.
It can be frustrating to try and do what’s best for yourself against your inner desires (believe that broken glass is capable of being cleaned up all in one go) only to still be punished (by who? Don’t look at us, seriously, some stuff does just happen. You need to decenter yourself in the narrative of the universe! We aren’t up here stubbing your toes and giving you splinters and stuff).
After your morning impalement, your At Home uniform shifts. You shed your Extra Thick™ socks and don indoor sandals. You wear your sandals every moment that you are not asleep. When you wake to use the restroom in the middle of the night (which happens 4 times a night now that you’re meeting your “water goals” which, from my vantage point, appear to be absolutely ruining your life), you carefully slide the sandals onto your feet before setting foot on the ground. After a shower, you slip into a towel and your sandals immediately follow. The glass could be anywhere, so you behave like it’s everywhere.
It’s difficult to logic our way out of terror. Getting a shard of glass in your foot (an injury you recovered from nearly instantly) is much less of a burden than worrying that any minute you may get a shard of glass in your foot. You can logically wrap your mind around this, but it’s difficult for that mental acknowledgement to translate to any meaningful change to the way you move through the world.
I don’t believe that wearing house sandals until your dying day is the answer, Virgo. But I also don't believe that pretending you aren’t afraid of things is a viable way of being less afraid of them (remember how you lived with a cat you were scared of for fourteen years? How you’d just like, leave any room he entered, abandoning whatever you’d been up to? Many movies went unfinished! Exposure therapy is clearly not for you!).
It’s okay to take the stairs for the rest of your days because you worry your hair could get pulled into the escalator’s bloodthirsty mouth (oh yeah, hair is a big part of the whole escalator thing, in case that wasn’t clear). It’s okay to be wary of broken glass in your home. It’s okay to not be chill in any capacity whatsoever! I’ll level with you, not once in your entire life has someone referred to you as chill, and as I peer into the horizon of your future I see that they never will. There’s really no sense in fighting it Virgo, so strap into your fears and get to know them intimately, because they’ll be with you for life!
Thank you for reading! <3
will forever call an escalator a "staircase to execution" from now on