However long or short they may be, our lives can usually be pared down to a collection of choices made on a few fateful nights. Rarely do we know for sure which of these nights will be the ones that will alter everything to come. But if you pay close attention, there is a sensation, a light tingle beneath the surface of your skin, that hints at destiny.
I, Medusa, Ayana Gray
I stopped reading when I hit that, and I did not pick the book back up for a while, which is not something a three and a half star read usually does to me.
It was the tingle that got me. Not the part about fateful nights, everybody knows about fateful nights. The part where she says you can feel them coming. That there is a physical tell, available to you in the moment, and the only thing standing between you and knowing is whether you were paying attention.
So I went looking. I sat down and tried to pull up every time in my life I have felt that specific thing, the low static under the skin that says something is happening here. I expected to come back with a short list of enormous nights.
That is not what came back.
Gym class
I was a good kid, and I want to be honest about why. Straight A’s, a couple of varsity sports, church, volunteer committees, the whole résumé. Some of that was because I liked it. A lot of it was because my home life was bad and anything less than that résumé would have been punished.
Which is what makes this next part so strange to me even now.
In gym class one afternoon I decided it would be funny to depants a kid. A week or so earlier he had come at me the same way, or had appeared to, and everybody laughed and it was nothing. I understand now that he was almost certainly faking it, going for the reaction rather than the act, because he was the class clown and that is what class clowns do. I did not understand that then.
I walked over to do it and the tingle came up my arms.
And I did it anyway, and he was a boxers guy, so everything came down, and the entire class saw all of it. We were in the principal’s office a few minutes later.
That was my first real one, and it was not a whisper. It was my body telling me, in the half second before my hands moved, that I did not actually know what I was walking into. I have never been in trouble with a school authority again in my life, and I am fairly sure that day is the reason.
The whistle
Later, same building, different room. I had shin splints, which anyone who has run track knows is not fun.
The coach offered to rub them out for me.
There was no ambiguity in what my skin did. It was not confusion and it was not a maybe. It was a flat, immediate no from somewhere underneath language, and it arrived before I had assembled a single conscious thought about the man.
I quit track after that season.
Nothing about my life is different because of that. I did not become a person shaped by it. It is on this list because it is the cleanest example I have of the tingle being correct about a human being before I had any evidence at all.
The car
I had a boyfriend in high school and he was, without exaggeration, the best boyfriend a girl could have had. He absorbed an enormous amount of drama from my house without ever making me feel like a burden about it. He was kind, and his family took me in. He seemed to genuinely love me and I have no reason all these years later to think he did not.
Partway through, I decided I might like another boy in our class, and rather than sit with that quietly like a person with any sense, I told a few friends, who were also his friends.
So of course we ended up in his car for a talk one day after school.
We were talking around it. He knew who it was, and he knew that I knew he knew. We were both performing a conversation neither of us was actually having, and there was a moment where he was in the middle of a sentence and I could have let it go by.
Instead I said, “Who?”
The tingle came up right before the word left my mouth. Not after. Right before, in the gap where I still had a choice.
And then I watched his face while he said the name out loud, and I have carried what that looked like for a very long time. It is one of the worst feelings I have ever caused on purpose.
That one matters to this essay for a reason I did not see until much later. Nobody was lying to me in that car. I was the one holding something closed, and I opened it in the cruelest available way, and my body flagged it a half second before I did it.
The everyday ones
There are the ordinary ones too, and I am not going to narrate them because everybody reading this already has their own. The ringing phone you know is bad news before you pick it up, without knowing yet what the news is. The room where two people are about to fight and the air changes about four seconds early. The particular quiet that means somebody has been working up to a hard conversation and is nearly ready to start it.
Those are worth noticing, because there is nobody deceiving you in any of them. Somebody has already died, or the fight has already been decided, or the person across from you has already worked out what they are going to say. The truth is finished and it simply has not reached you yet.
The boys down the road
When we moved to where we live now, my kids were small. Living in town was brand new to all of us, and there were brothers down the road at almost exactly the right ages, and my kids had somebody to play ball with in an empty lot and run around with until the streetlights came on. I was thrilled about it. I met the parents and did all the things you do.
There was a tingle. A small one, at the very beginning, and I talked myself out of it inside of a day, because what kind of person meets a family and decides against them for no reason.
I ignored it for years.
Time does what time does. The older brother showed it first, in the way older brothers do, and once I had seen it in him I started watching the younger one more carefully. The clearest single example I have is this. He came over to play, and while my son was outside with the rest of them, he went into my son’s bedroom by himself and destroyed every Lego figure my kid had built over the course of years. Heads were pulled off and arms thrown around the room. Then he walked back out and rejoined the game and never said a word about it, before or after.
They are all grown up now, or close to it. By junior high my kids had found their own group and drifted off from those two without any intervention from me, which is the only part of this I am actually proud of. Neither of those boys turned out to be someone I would want in my house. Neither, it turns out, are their parents.
The tingle was right at the front door and I overruled it because it was inconvenient and because I wanted my kids to have friends.
The man who wanted to buy it
And then there is the one that actually changed everything.
A man with more power than me sat across from me and told me my business idea was not a good one. That I would never make it work. That I would be lucky to scrape together a hundred customers. And that, given all of that, I should just sell it to him.
The tingle came up while he was still talking.
It did not tell me he was wrong about the market or right about the market. It told me that the man in front of me was saying two things at once, and that both of them could not be true, because nobody offers to buy a worthless thing.
I said no. I bet on myself instead, which sounds like a phrase off a poster and felt at the time like standing on a chair in the dark.
About a year in, I hit customer one hundred and one. I was completely alone in a room and I hollered anyway, out loud, and said his name, and told him exactly what he could do with his hundred.
That business has supported my family for more than fifteen years. It is the ground the rest of it is built on. That tingle changed my destiny in the way Gray means it.
What I actually found
Now look at that list.
A gym class, a track coach and a boy’s face in a car. A phone I had not answered yet, a family at the end of the road and one man across a table.
Exactly one of them altered the course of my life.
Which is not at all what I was expecting when I went looking, and it took me a while to work out what the rest of them have in common, because they are wildly different situations with different stakes and thirty years between the first and the last.
Here it is. Every single one of them is a moment where something true was about to become visible.
The coach was presenting himself as a coach. The man across the table was presenting an idea as worthless while trying to buy it. The family at the end of the road was presenting as fine. The phone was ringing about something that had already happened. And in the car, the thing being hidden was mine, and I was the one who chose to drag it into the open.
The tingle is not a destiny detector. It detects the gap between what is true and what I have been told. Sometimes a person is holding that gap open on purpose. Sometimes it is only time. My body does not appear to care which.
The quiet
Here is the part I have not been able to shake since I worked it out.
The decisions that actually built this life, I made with a completely quiet body.
Not one of the genuinely load-bearing choices came with the tingle, not the marriage or the kids or the move, and not the ordinary Tuesdays where something enormous was set in motion while I was thinking about dinner.
For about a day that felt like a failure, like my instrument was broken at exactly the moments it should have been loudest. Then I turned it over and it looks like the opposite.
My body was quiet on those because there was nothing to detect. Nobody was concealing anything. No one in the room was two things at once. Everyone was telling the truth, including me, and so the alarm that goes off when something is being hidden had nothing to say.
The tingle never protected me from a single bad choice I made in good faith, and it never will, because that is not what it is for. It has only ever told me one thing, which is that somebody in this room is not showing me all of it.
Which is less romantic than destiny. It is also considerably more useful, and I have stopped wishing it were the other thing.
What I do with it now
I have not turned this into a system, and I do not trust anyone who would.
What has changed is small. When it goes off, I no longer ask myself what I am supposed to do, which is the question I used to ask and which it has never once been able to answer. I ask what is being hidden here, and who is doing the hiding, and whether it is me.
At the front door of that house down the road, that question would have taken about four seconds and I would have answered it honestly and probably done nothing differently anyway, because my kids needed friends and I was not going to take that from them over a feeling. But I would have been watching from year one instead of year four.
That is the whole upgrade, and it isn’t better decisions. It’s earlier attention.
Format: eBook | Source: Library | Rating: 3.5 stars
For the record on the book itself, since this essay is not really a review: the trouble with a Greek mythology retelling is that you already know the destination, Medusa becomes Medusa, and the only tension available is how and when. Gray keeps that going and it moves fast. It read younger than I expected, closer to YA in tone, and it did not land on me the way Stone Blind did earlier this year. It is a good book that gave me one great line, and I will take that trade every time.
Where this one came from, and where it sent me: Stone Blind. After Natalie Haynes’s version of Medusa, I wanted the same story told by someone else, and I, Medusa was next. Right after it I went back to Haynes for A Thousand Ships, and I am not finished with Greek retellings where the woman gets to be the whole story instead of the thing the story happens to.
Library first, always. But if you’re buying anyway, my Bookshop.org link backs indie bookstores and a sliver comes to me.
I want to know about yours. Not the night that changed your life, the ordinary one where your skin went off about something and you found out later it was right.
What did your body know before you did?