I heard it somewhere before. The sound had escaped my memory, but it could not escape each cell of my body as it reacted to it. Yes, I had heard it somewhere before.
She spoke to me like she had spoken to me a million times before. There were no awkward pauses, no uncertain grasps and inane commentary that made even stoic minds like ours seem awkward. Every word, every question and every response seemed to flow naturally like the script itself had not only been written long ago, but rehearsed countless times before now.
Yet I could not remember. This was our first conversation, regardless of how natural it all seemed. I was sure of it. I savored every morsel like a child taking his first bite of a sweet fruit. I tasted every letter, held in suspense every word until the next arrived, and responded like it was all just meant to be.
I caved in that moment. Or fell. Whatever you wish to call it, it happened to me during that conversation. I was happy, and she was basking in that glow as if she had found her home there.
That conversation ended sometime around the moment the sun rose. Neither of us had realized just how long we had been talking, but we both knew that it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be the last time we’d whittle away the morning darkness together. At some point we’d carved out a path for the Sun, and at some point the warmth had blanketed us with such a knowing that we had no choice but to surrender.
Connection between humans Being is a remarkable thing. Sometimes it is like fine art, taking its time to arrive and make itself known. Others, it is born in an instant, creating neither sinners nor saints in the process of its own divine creation. We are all beings of multiple connections, sometimes connected to memories, sometimes to hope, others to now. Yet when another soul enters our space, we are faced with a dilemma.
There, our question, our choice, will always be which connection we choose to honor – the connection to our past where the scars formed and old fear returns, or the connection to this moment, where two old souls newly mated watch the Sun rise in full surrender and complete realization.
Warriors honor their days by valuing their nights, and honor their nights by not wasting their days. While I will not grab a rose by its thorn in honor of the blood once shed doing so, I will not hesitate to seize this moment in deliberate understanding, and I will not hesitate to bend my knee to breathe in its sweet fragrance.
That is, after all, our own unique circles of life where pain gives way to joy, where a wildfires’ destruction makes way for new forests; the sand washes away to form new beaches, and mountains erode to give us a better view of the rising Sun.
We are such remarkable beings of enormous possibility. In the moment where memory fails to recall this angel’s voice now soothing my tired ears, my heart remembers her and my soul recognizes the enormous potential in the encounter. In that short moment before the mind adds its requirements, its rules, and its games to this fine reenactment of love, we both remember what it was like to roam free in open fields, hand-in-hand, laughing about nothing and everything at the same time. In that flicker of light before the curtains are closed, the innocence returns and love is all there is. There, in that small space of remembrance, we can be who we were before we learned to get in our own way, and we can enjoy the sliver of light cresting above our lover’s horizon.
There, there are no crowds to please, no stories to tell, no judgments to question. We are like babes in the cradle again, and we are as pure as we have ever been.
There, I found I loved her. There, she found she loved me, and there is where it all started. Our story, the only one worth telling.