I’ve wanted for three days to write something about this burning love inside of me. Every time I visit the space where the downloads usually are, they’re fuzzy.
I feel disconnected to formulate it in a way that touches the essence of the power that I feel, and it seems to me like I’m clumsily drawing a stick figure while trying to paint a masterpiece of Aphrodite.
I fell asleep last night feeling the energy of someone I barely know, and yet I think I know him more deeply than I know most people. And, further, I think he knows me more deeply than most people do.
None of it has to do with anything of this world or probably otherwise. As I fell asleep last night, I could feel this human, and that’s a hard thing to talk about in a society that places expectations and stipulations on how interpersonal relationships should look, or what they should be.
Society is transactional. This was not.
I could feel this connectedness that transcended space and time, and I imagined so clearly us as threads sewn together in a larger blanket, enveloping just a small pocket of the world.
I’m talking about something energetic, and the way I share this type of love.
She’d visited me in my dream the night before, and I remembered sitting with my arms around her shoulders on the edge of a river in a city I’d never been to. We were watching a parade, and she was telling me about a new blog she had created. I think the day was bright, and the buildings were white and glistening. I woke up feeling her as clearly as the blue sky we sat under.
I don’t know her barely at all, not enough to ask her “How’s your family” or “How was your trip to the grocery store?” That’s not the type of relationship we have.
Like with this man from yesterday, she and I barely know one another. I don’t know how she perceives me or cares to. I just know that once, one time, I shared something energetic with her, and I fell in love with all she was.
“I felt her, and I felt her feel me, and there was depth. I felt that she and I had this whole other unspoken, unheard experience.”
I wrote this in my journal days later, after I processed most of it.
And yet, now, back in “life,” I sense she does not desire me to love her more deeply, or maybe at all. Surely my projection, but is it? Maybe, that moment has ended, and it was only meant for a second, not a season.
Surely, my projection, and I find that many people walk through the world asking for love, and they don’t know how to hold it when it comes. I’ve been afraid of what it means to love and be loved. Afraid, for whatever reason, perhaps of losing it all, being left alone. Afraid to be seen in all of that intimacy.
My last partner was an artist who wanted to draw my portrait. I wouldn’t let him, and I resisted it so fully, I said awful things to halt the experience as it began. “F––king make it stop.”
I remember sitting, sweaty on my bed in what is a dirty, small, New York City apartment feeling inadequate and rotten.
As I rehearsed that painful memory time and time again in my mind, I’ve come to the conclusion it wasn’t about what he would see, but rather, about what I would.
That left me a lot of free space, and I asked her, Tao, to allow me a peaceful summer of expansion. During the last month, I fell in love many times.
I don’t mean romantic love when I write this way, and the fear anyone may misconstrue it has my fingers locked trying to tap my keys. I have someone I share that romantic part of myself with, and as of now, he’s the only one.
I mean rather, something deeper than this human transactional exchange.
It’s something that you see, and you know when you see it that it’s that precious piece. Someone offers it to you, and you feel God in your being because that’s the offering. They show you the light and pray you won’t dim it with your insecurity or your fear. They want your oxygen to feed their fire.
I remember the day during this month that I noticed it was important to someone that I see his eyes. I noticed that he cared more about me seeing them than him seeing mine.
I made it mean that he was showing me something beyond what is here, and so, I looked deeply at him with adoration. And then I noticed, he’s also possibly very afraid of that. Surely, my projection.
And all of it is very confusing.
Like that text… that I sent. Maybe it was just for a moment. Maybe the fear is actually mine, to be more overt about it all.
But this love has no place to “go” or “live” or “be.” It doesn’t “turn into something.” It doesn’t “manifest as something.” This sort of love just pulses. It pulses in my body, in my hands, in my face, and with my heart, it pulses. It pulses in thought, in energy, transcending space and time.
This sort of love is cosmic, and I only know I feel it when I do… There for a moment, gone in an instant.
Lying in my bed, holding the energy of a sacred human… All here, all not here, all nothing but me experiencing myself, and wondering… does anyone else truly exist at all?
Surely, my projection.
I am so happy that you reran this piece, Andee, because I didn’t comment the first time.
Some years back I saw a program where a cleric asked something to the end of “Who says eternity is linear? Perhaps it is vertical?”
That resonated. I don’t know if it resonates with you.
I have experienced “flashes of verticality” a couple of time and while love is undoubtedly present, I wouldn’t use the term “falling in love” for my experience as much as “being in the presence of love”. The lesson I took away was that I have no idea how huge this is, but now I am aware that it is there and is beyond my comprehension – and I am fine with that. Would I like more of that? Sure, who wouldn’t? And I put myself in situations where it might happen.
That said, I also understand why some people may be frightened by the experience because it is like somebody seeing your naked soul and still loving you. But afterwards they have still seen your naked soul…
And you probably saw theirs – and there was just the one.
Charlotte, your last paragraph is pure poetry. It’s so beautiful. I can’t describe the emotion even. Thank you for this. 🙏🏻