Three of Swords: When to Call It
image: a black person with a tear running down their cheek.
Lots of people are rewatching GIRLS, which means it's time to come out as the show's lone Black fan.
It's not an art from artist thing. It's that I like it when things are 1. good and 2. not about anything that's ever happened in my life.
You'd think that since I went to Hampshire during the hipster moment, and lived in Brooklyn until the pandemic, there'd be some overlap. You know, Oberlin, Sparks, original Four Loko, the song "Bulletproof." But, again, I am Black so I am free of all but the last three of those associations. .
Like Sex and the City before it, GIRLS is a rare treat that involves no one I know and nothing I care about. This allows me to watch it as a blank slate. For me, the show is pure entertainment, and better yet, a show about writers.
I'm a sucker for writers writing shows about writers. Bojack Horseman, for instance, or again, Sex and the City.
It's also a show about having friends in your 20s, among the best that genre has to offer.
GIRLS is full of satisfying dialog, complex characters, and low-stakes drama. Its protagonist, Hannah Horvath, is among television's most notorious pills, which turns out to be what allows the camera to zoom back and let other characters have their moment.
Over the six weird seasons, we watch the Marnie, Shoshanna, Jessa, and Hannah grow into real adults.
We also watch them stop being friends. Slowly at first, like when Jessa attends, then ruins, Shoshanna's women in business meet up. Or when Jessa's boyfriend, who is Hannah's ex-boyfriend, goes back to a heavily pregnant Hannah for a day.
But there's a scene in the final season of GIRLS, when Hannah is getting ready to leave the city for good that summarizes the essence of the Three of Swords perfectly.
It's Shoshanna's engagement party and she's invited no one from what used to be her closest friends. They all find a way to crash the party all the same.
The uninvited guests fight in Shoshanna's elegant bathroom while the real guests mingle. Finally, the bride-to-be busts into the bathroom and announces that the friendship is over. She has new friends now that work for her life.
"Let's just call it," Shoshanna tells them, after long being relegated to the lowest tier of the group.
The scene is intended to show that, despite being the youngest of them, Shoshanna has grown beyond the friend group, and yes, into herself. It's not a weepy confession, it doesn't look painful from the outside, it simply acknowledges the truth of the situation.
They were friends, and now they're not.
This is the Three of Swords. People expect it to hurt. The truth of the Three of Swords is that it ends something that's hurting.
It can be a needle that stitches up an open wound. More often, it's the scabs that follow a hundred cuts. It's allowing what is dead to be dead.
And like Death, the Three of Swords is a three. It's there to test the limits of our creativity, and our capacity to change. It wants to remodel our life in the shape of the truth.
Only one card sits between the Three of Swords and the Ace of its suit. The Two of Swords, which is true deliberation and waiting, sometimes to long. This is the part that hurts, the part of us that knows the truth but won't allow it to change our lives.
The Two of Swords can be a sword of Damocles if you let it. You hold onto a dead thing and the sword swings over your head at night.
The Three of Swords can only come when you're brave enough to let that shit go. Not because it's pleasant to do so, or because it'll win you any friends. It probably won't.
What it will do is give you a little taste of Death, which is the truest thing that tarot knows. That's what the Ace of Swords does too.
Swords are often there when we're ready to clean house, or be the thing that needs to be cleaned from someone else's. It's a bumpy, bloody ride of a suit, but that doesn't mean we can skip it.
No wise person would skip the grief of the Three of Swords for the card that precedes it. Those swords are heavy. The cost of lying to yourself is too dear.
I'm a firm believer that anything that can be killed by the truth should be killed by the truth.
This goes for all relationships, jobs, ways of being, and parts of the self.
I'm not the best at taking this advice. I love hard, and sometimes too long. This is why people only appreciate the Three of Swords when someone has literally die. The universe has made the decision for them. What can they do now but grieve?
For the rest of us, we have to make the choice to put the swords down. With empty hands, we can pull the blindfold from our face, maybe even turn and face the moon.
The Two of Swords, though it's rarely said, is also a card about feeling ashamed of our own part. Like the Eight of Swords, it hides from the consequences of our own actions, and those of people closest to us.
This helps no one: not you and not them. It's through self-acceptance, including the reality of our least perfect choices, that we can love others well.
It's also through this lens that we can see if others are loving us well. Sometimes we fear that realization more than seeing the bad in ourselves!
Like the women in GIRLS, sometimes it's better for everyone to go their own ways. That way they can remake some of those bonds in a more recent image.
When loved ones are no longer loving, when every day feels like a fight, when you can't love yourself and someone else at once, it's time for the Three of Swords.
Sometimes you gotta call it.
Further Thoughts
image: hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.
"The way we talk about healing in spiritual spaces can be fucked up! At best, it's vague and sprawling. At worst, its just straight up ableism. No wonder it's unable to account for what cannot be healed, only accepted.
It is in these moments of radical, uncanny acceptance where we find tarot's Temperance."