One

One year ago today, my life changed.

It happened in the evening. I was in Houston where a client had flown me to work with her and her clients for a week, Houston where it was still summer and still humid. I was in Houston still processing the recent formality to the inevitable slow painful unraveling of the previous three-plus years spent with a boy-man that morphed into ten teary shower minutes feeling what it might be like to be me if I had always felt loved. I was in Houston feeling my Self for perhaps the first time, my Self tall and pale among the Chinese community I stayed in and shopped in that week that cemented the sense of alienation and solitude I had brought with me.

It happened in the evening, in Houston. I was sleeping on the hard hotel bed and awoke, hard. I was no longer alone. I felt something with me — someone? — and it felt wonderful. A palpable presence. An energetic force. My heart twined the feeling into arms and lips and I lay curled on that hard bed, no longer alone. Loved.

The feeling followed me home.

I thought it would dissipate, disappear, disintegrate, but it did not.

Weeks went by. Then more than a month. At first I was determined to attach a face, a name, arms and lips to the feeling but after several wrong turns and missteps I decided to let it go. To be content with the feeling, the ghost-arms, the love from somewhere, and to continue moving on and being me.

After that it didn’t take long for him to find me.

One year ago, my heart opened. One year ago, I began to believe. One year ago, I wept from feeling beauty. One year ago, I started walking to where I now stand, hand in hand with my soulmate, embracing the feeling, wanting more and more.

And my Soulmate writes this on my laptop — yes I am allowing him to contribute to my writing for the first time — “I love you with all my heart and Soul – and it is scary to even write this… but I am WITH you, Soulmate!”

One whole year he has been with me so far. And we are. One.