The day before this day, Jack left for a camping trip with his ex-girlfriend. They had dated for five years, and it was a camping trip around the Northeast. It was supposed to last nine days, and I was perfectly fine with it. At this point I was paying lip service to the relationship, but still committed to it based on the promises I had made throughout our relationship. Since I had met Zebey, the running joke between Bésame and I was that I had a girl crush on her and she had one on me. Remember, Bésame was dating Zebey’s roommate, so there was a very interesting, almost incestuous game of telephone going on between the four of us.
When I was a child, I found a copy of my older brother’s Playboy magazine, and was fascinated by the pictures. They gave me funny feelings that I didn’t understand but wasn’t old enough to over analyze. My best friend and I would look through them and then recreate the photo shoots. Innocent enough, for eight or nine year olds. Flash forward to my Catholic raised fifteen year old self going to a Lutheran High School, sitting on my girl friend’s lap having those same funny feelings. This time, however, I knew they were wrong and that it was Satan trying to lead me astray. I could talk myself out of it, mind over body. Thus began the years of denial, the years of hating my body, the years of my thinking mind being King. Even when I was nineteen in my college dorm room imagining my boyfriend was a girl in order to become aroused enough to have sex with him, I was still selling myself straight.
Then, yoga saved me. Slowly but surely I gave my body a voice. I will always have a very scientific mind, unbelieving until there is hard proof. Always a skeptic, a mind with a deafening voice. Thanks to yoga, all of the sudden my body is talking to me, and for the first time since I was a child I am listening. Talk about freedom, talk about more than one voice running the show, talk about choice.
When I was in Hawaii, I made the choice to start listening to my body as much, if not more so, than the voice in my head that was making me miserable. Without this fundamental shift in my identity, what happened next would have been impossible. I would have been stuck in the prison of my own making.
That night, Bésame and I rode our bikes to a local pizza place, where her girlfriend worked. Surprise surprise, after so many weeks of not seeing or speaking to her, there was Zebey. I felt myself light up from the inside again, completely sober. No alcohol to blame the feelings on this time. Oh denial, my old friend. I felt my heart starting to wake up and look around, sniffing out a soulmate.
The four of us ended up riding to Bésame’s sister’s house, where a backyard party was in full swing. I didn’t see anyone else though, for me there was only her. Why was I so drawn to her? Was it because I loved having emotional affairs? My boyfriend was camping with his ex, why shouldn’t I get to take some power back?
As the night progressed, a healthy double gin and soda later, a division happened in the backyard. Zebey and I sitting on the ground absorbed in conversation, everyone else off somewhere in the distance. We talked about nothing and everything. It was so easy, so natural, familiar. My relationship with Jack was incredibly hard, I had convinced myself that being uncomfortable in it was good for my personal growth. Sitting with this light being, feeling and having everything I always wanted out of another human being without having to try at all, was like finding an oasis in the desert. I never wanted to be without her. It was the feeling I had always dreamt of, the feeling I wasn’t sure existed outside of my imagination. The feeling I had only read about in fairy tales.
I told her one of my secrets – that I can read minds, emotions and quality of energy from a fellow human being through their touch. Of course I couldn’t tell her that without her testing the validity of it so she put her hand on the back of my heart, and asked me who she was. I told her I was too drunk to tell. I couldn’t say what I wanted to say in that moment, the truth was that when she put her hand on my back my head exploded and I left my body. All I saw was light. I saw my past, present and future. I saw us tied together by lifetimes. I saw the long journey back to each other was finally coming to a close. Screeching back to present reality though, having just met her, I could not tell her this. It would have been considered insane and maybe a little bit creepy. I needed to play the most important game of my life in the right way, following all the rules and not missing a step. Just like rock climbing without a rope. One wrong move and I’m toast.