THE
CARDS WILL TELL
BY RANA ALSOUFI
M
imi Bouakham shuffles and scatters a deck of pastel oracle cards on the table in front of her, drawing three and displaying them in an upside-down “A” formation. “Card one is your fated life; the call, the ego, the obvious life,” she says. The 19-year-old UK sophomore plucks one of the three cards: “Lifting the Veil: Questioning everything. Anything unaligned must go,” it reads. “During your life, your destiny was just to be curious and to question everything,” Bouakham says. “Maybe you have been noticing that there’s stuff going on in your life that you’ve been questioning, like ‘is what’s considered the norm actually the norm?’ Maybe it’s like that for you, maybe it’s going to become like that for you.” She picks the second card and lays it out. It reads, “To Wait: It’s not yet time. Things are being woven.” “This card is the call of the soul, so your destiny life,” says Boukham, touching the artwork on the card, which depicts a young girl sitting at the opening of a galaxy, about to fall in. “Your fated life will always connect with your destiny life, so even though you want to question everything, it’s best to also question them with patience… Those answers will come to you as you grow. The answers are already there… they’re 32 | KRNL LIFESTYLE + FASHION
preparing to show themselves to you.” She picks the third and final card. “The change of action you’re being called to make,” Bouakham says as she reveals the “Star Brothers” card, decorated with the image of a celestial-looking man with two birds on either side of him, peering downwards. “You’re more protected than you can imagine. They’re waiting for you to trust yourself and to trust the people around you… to trust that those answers are going to come to you soon.” Bouakham was born into a Buddhist family and said she had grown up surrounded by spirituality all her life, looking towards her religion mostly for protection and guidance. She only began her journey through tarot and oracle reading, however, in 2019, when the medium started gaining more popularity through different social media platforms. She said that her start with tarot began shortly after a breakup with a guy that she had been dating at the time. “TikTok was already super popular, and that’s when all those tarot videos started popping up,” Bouakham said. “I didn’t really enjoy them as much because the tarot readings were kind of for entertainment purposes and a general audience… Like yeah, these TikToks seem a little accurate