Eternal Flame

I had had my fair share of crushes. I’d held puppy love in my teenage hands and had felt my mind go haywire at the thought of certain boys that always inevitably turned out to be not so special… Perhaps mediocre at best. And all the while, I mistook it for love. I don’t fault myself for it though. In fact, I’m grateful that I was able to feel such light, mercurial feelings regarding love at some point in my life because everything changed when I met Percy.

I was seventeen years old and on a family vacation I didn’t even really want to be on in the first place. It was the middle of summer, ergo we should have been at the beach like we had a tradition of doing for as many years as I could remember. Yet, there we were in the mountains.

Little did I know that this was the detour that would eventually lead to my life as I knew it being tossed into the blender, spiral me around until I was completely transformed and then send me down the vortex of remembrance.

I’m getting way ahead of myself here though.

Percy was eighteen and working at the resort I was staying at.

I caught a glimpse of him from a distance and it was as if my nervous system was magnetized to his. My eyes softened, my heart thundered fiercely, and bold words came tumbling out of my mouth, despite my habitual shyness. His soul whispered “don’t you remember me?”, though I was not equipped to hear it at the time.

I actually had a manipulative boyfriend who was quite a bit older than me. I’d had him for years and essentially had Stockholm syndrome. I was miserably sinking into his narcissistic quicksand but did not have an adequate trust in the unknown to just woman up and leave.

I have forgiven myself for feeling that weak, but I also have the deep inner knowing that Percy is the only thing that could have saved me from the situation. I know if I had stayed stuck in my very small minded human perspective, I would have married that guy and lived a very unfulfilling life of codependency. But I was made to blossom into so much more. Percy taught me how to surrender.

He was absolutely crazy about me in the beginning, and the feeling was profusely mutual. I only knew to seek surface level attention, and that is what he gave. That is what I accepted. I was only scarcely aware of how trivial it was for him to truly open up, so I unknowingly took it for granted when he talked about his life, including his troublesome past which involved a lot of raising himself. What he said was what I read and I didn’t have the depth capacity at the time to see beyond that. I wasn’t equipped to view all the hidden layers, so I was dismayed and disheartened when we got too intimate and he suddenly withdrew.

I started a relationship with a friend of his partially as a band aid for my own wound, and in some measure, to hurt him- to get back at him for maiming me.

It was months and years of back and forth. I would link up with Percy whenever I was in town and whenever I stopped hearing from him for good, I got serious (though not emotionally) into a karmic relationship with the aforementioned “friend” of his.

Upon ending this relationship three years later with no contact with Percy whatsoever, he appeared out of the blue asking how I had been. He was, yet again, my saving grace as karma was devouring me whole.

Just as I expected at this point, it did not and would not last long. I would hear from Percy now and then- even see him on occasion, but nothing was exchanged between us aside from shallow flirting and unwieldy intimacy.

So why had the magic never dissipated? Why did his name still send shivers down my spine and make my heart thud equivalently as it did upon our first encounter?

I felt as though I had lied to myself for years as I chased this man who had the malicious urge to run from my affection, leaving my heart trampled and isolated.

It wasn’t until nine years after we met that I began to go inward, reshaping the broken shards of my heart with my own hands into a mosaic masterpiece that I learned that his attempt to guard his own fragile heart was not malefic by any means, but instead, a shield of defense against the very thing I had been prone to all those years ago- unconscious patterning.

The evil was not in the actions themselves, but instead the subconscious reasoning to hide the true self.

I was being gifted a mirror into my own soul by higher forces. The pain was a largesse crafted specifically for me.

I got to work. I spent countless nights lit by candlelight, sometimes by merely moonlight alone and dove deep into my own psyche. I grounded myself in nature, indulging in barefooted walks through the forests and sunscreenless strolls down the beaches. I submerged myself in every natural body of water I crossed paths with and collected treasures from my escapades consisting of stones, shells, feathers, and flowers. I stargazed with a wonder that bared a striking resemblance to one I recalled from my early adolescence, charting constellations and researching their meanings and origins.

“Hows” and “whys” began to pour from me, spiraling into a mandala of inner reflection.

Why did I feel so telepathically linked to Percy? How did I sabotage my own dreams with deep rooted fears? And most importantly, where did these traumas stem from?

As it would turn out, I discovered I had a fear of abandonment. I figured that much, but what I was not prepared to find was that the root cause did not originate in my first experiences with relationships, though that did add a boost of anxiety to an already disorienting predicament. I also had a father wound. My father had always been present physically, but emotionally, he took no time to see who I truly was any more than one might expect from a passing stranger on the street. It didn’t stop there. I had deep family wounds projected onto me, an unconscious evil passed down from generation to generation. With newfound power and sovereignty, I decided it would end with me.

My findings were astonishing, but the most profound realization was that the answers resided within me the whole entire time.

I had the great epiphany that as appalling and unbeknownst to me as my wounds were, Percy’s had to be at least a thousand times worse. It all became crystal clear. Of course he was terrified of our bond. No one, not even his own family, had ever made him feel safe. He wasn’t looking for pity when he told me as much. He was handing me an information pamphlet on the inner fundamentals of his psyche.

We were tethered together because we were mirrors of each others souls. We were the push towards each others inner healing.

We were two hearts, making up the same soul. And this was most certainly not our first life together.

This was precisely the moment I finally heard the soul whisper of “don’t you remember me?”

Yes, remembrance rained down to and through me. We had never truly been separate from each other.

I continued my journey of delving deep into my true essence, carrying this information with me, tucked deep into the depths of my being as the earth made another trip around the sun. This year marked a decade since I’d met Percy. We hadn’t seen each other in four years- had not even spoken in over a year.

I was no longer afraid though. I had a deep inner knowing of not just what truly was, but I also had a secure sense of who I was.

So, when I heard from Percy for the first time in what felt like ages, butterflies exploded in celebratory remembrance, flooding my cells with courage instead of apprehension. I was liberated and I didn’t even have to question whether he was too.

I felt the shift between us when he asked me when I would be back in town and declared that we needed to talk. I knew what was up. I intuitively knew exactly what we needed to talk about.

When I saw Percy face to face again, I was twenty-seven years old and he was twenty-eight. He looked foreign and familiar. He looked like a beautiful stranger and my husband of numerous lifetimes.

My hands shook slightly and the corners of my mouth tugged up in a nostalgia-laced smile.

He pulled me in for a hug and it felt as though lightning crackled between us. We stayed like this for what felt like seconds and also years.

When we finally did pull away from each other, awareness sparkled in his eyes, indubitably mirroring my own.

“You haven’t changed, Andi…” he finally choked out, familiarity swirling around his deep, yet shaking voice.

“Only, you’re even more you now…” he murmured, timidly cupping my check as he found his ground and locked eyes with mine,

“And I have never loved you more.”