My ex keeps contacting me. How should I

This is a handling problem, not a feeling problem — and the cards don't say your ex wants anything back, only what happens on your side of the thread if you keep answering it as you have been.

The Past — Ace of Swords, upright. The clarity isn't what's missing. There was already a clear cut: the conversation where you both knew what happened, said it plainly, and ended it. So any pull you feel toward re-reading old messages to find a different ending is looking for information you already received. Nothing new is in the archive.

The Present — Three of Pentacles, upright. This is the seat that answers your question, and it answers it as *work*, not warmth. Three of Pentacles is the card of a defined arrangement, an agreed scope, skilled labour done to a shape — people handling something with terms. The active dynamic here is that every message you send without a fixed rule is unpaid work on an open contract: he gets to keep showing up, you get to keep reassessing. What this situation needs is structure, not another explanation. Three of Pentacles is not a reconciliation card and it is not a reading about his intentions; it says the thing that's missing is a boundary you can repeat without improvising it each time.

The Future — Ten of Cups, reversed. If the present continues — if contact stays this open-ended and you keep replying off the cuff — this is the tendency that follows: the picture of the two of you as a settled, warm, whole thing quietly stops being available. Reversed here is dissolution of an ideal, not a punishment and not a prophecy about him. It's the fantasy of returning to a version that was already over, losing its grip on its own, which is often what frees you.

How to tell which one you're in. Read the record, not the feeling: go back through the last ten messages in both directions and mark where each new contact lands. If nearly all of them reopen the same unresolved point you answered the first time — that same-same-same loop — then the Ten of Cups reversed is the operative seat and the Three of Pentacles fix is a fixed rule you state once and hold. If the newer contacts actually move forward each time, something concrete and new, then you're in the arrangement the Three of Pentacles describes and the reversed Ten of Cups is only the old shape of the fantasy, not your future.

Your step, in the next 48 hours: open the thread and write down, in one line, what a reply to him is *for* — information, politeness, curiosity, or nothing — and what it is never for. Then decide beforehand whether the answer is one short closing line or silence, and put it in the thread as a standing rule rather than re-deciding at the next buzz.

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