Of the events that led to her confinement she can only speculate: Had the three-legged stools the nightclub stored beneath the DJ booth been any color but the black that matched the darkness perhaps she’d be free—chastised for trespassing, yes, and steered out to the street—but free.

Had she only left a trace of her presence above, a bottle or a handbag set like bait beside the decks, perhaps a barback would have seen her trembling shadow and removed her from this self-made isolation. Had she been clumsier, drunker, slower to catch the fire extinguisher she knocked over, the echo of metal on plywood would have revealed her to security, whose impatient glance around the curtained dance floor could not discern her.

What froze her to the spot, she wondered, what instinct kept her still and quiet against the promise of detection? She felt no thrill in her trespass, no fear even but rather the tranquility of having discovered an unmarked cave by a familiar sea. The star-shaped earring her boyfriend wanted back lured her under, its broken clasp a fated beckoning to the sticky cables and hardened limes beneath the DJ booth at Amulet.

Amulet had been her first Bushwick night club, incubating her party, now a collective, Paradise Vision, before it blew up and had to move to a bigger venue. Returning to play at Amulet again felt like a kind of homecoming. She was only twenty the first time she played here. One of the bartenders found her Jill Scott bootleg and Budots remixes on SoundCloud and snuck her in through the back to play his fundraiser for GLITS.

That first night at Amulet she had waited in the alleyway, clutching the USB in her pocket in a fist, worried it’d disappear somehow and she’d have nothing to offer.

She was motioned in with a side hug, and though her patron spoke in her ear the music was so loud from the monitors that she barely caught a thing. The crowd fixed their eyes upon her, standing there behind the booth like a pulpit. She plugged in as the DJ playing before her blended in a new beat. But she knew what direction she wanted. She cut the mids so the bass of her Maya Angelou edit could take over. Phenomenal Woman washed over the crowd, their minds and bodies returning to the music as she faded into the tableau, as obvious and commonplace as the exit sign behind her.

That’s when she noticed them: the twenty-two faces of the Major Arcana painted large and looming on the ruddy red walls surrounding her. The figures were obscured by the speakers, or bisected by the limbs of the pulsing crowd. Beside her, the fog machine hissed to life. Red house lights refracted off the drifting mist, stretching her attention towards corners of the pictures that, for a moment, were hidden—a chain to nowhere, a lone wrist, a floating pitcher—then revealed—the length of a sword, an exact roman numeral, a brilliant star—just like the earring she’d lost.

Kneeling there, hiding beneath the booth for hours, surrounded by those same walls in the silent dark, the memory of her first night at Amulet emerged from the mud of her mind. She saw herself in the High Priestess. Sitting before her, staring out from the walls with the same patient expression as the eyes of the crowd. What does she have to give, she wondered, what token would pull the curtain aside, and show her the priestess’s secrets.

No, she realized, as she leaned into a headphone to match her beats. The High Priestess was not guarding the secret. She was the secret. And in exchange for her dedication, the priestess will open a path for her.

It’s the right path, she nods to herself, as the dazzling rays of The Sun come into view. She could be a guiding light.

Towards what, she asks, releasing her eye to find their answer. She laughs to herself, giddy from the heights of resonance. The scales of Justice fill her vision. She sees it now, her mission: to be safe and free.

Freedom comes in many forms, but this freedom, the freedom of The Moon, of movement, of the howling of the dogs is a freedom of a different kind. It offers, Here: Be free here. Let the heartbeat take shape.

Show me the shape, she instructs, and The Tower reveals itself to her. Or rather, the bolt of lightning that strikes the tower and sets empire aflame declares itself her tool to wield.

But who was I that night, she asks herself. What was her part in these ceaseless nights that, like turns of a carousel, renew themselves? Was she The Fool on the edge of something new? Or the angel that brings together The Lovers? Or The Hermit, crouched beneath the decks as she is, her music a lantern in the night?

In the morning, when the porter brings up the lights and on his rounds finds her beneath the booth she will try to explain.

“I lost an earring,” she’ll start.

But security footage will show her step around her interrogator and stare up at The High Priestess, as if in a trance.

She is the Abbess of Amulet, the Mother of the House of Paradise, the High Priestess herself as her vision foretold—and she is shooed out of the front door.