Lightning strikes

“You'll never know unless you try,” said Zoe.

The sentence played over and over again in Katie’s mind. This incredibly intense pressure to take action and to take it now as if her very life depended on it. It was more than a pull. It was as though her very soul demanded it.

Was she ever going to get this thought out of her mind? How had her life gone so suddenly into another dimension?

She didn’t know what was real anymore. Her life felt like a movie.

Katie sat in The Hit watching the rain hit the pavement outside. This was her happy place. Her safe space. Something about the smell of the coffee mixed with the old reconditioned wood grounded her like no other spot. 

Her best friend Zoe had opened this place up a few years ago and Katie had watched in awe at the beautiful space she created for their tiny town. A little corner of wonder to escape from the small town feels. She was so proud of her and how her hard work and persistence had paid off.

Now The Hit was one of the only constants remaining in Katie’s life. 

After losing her beloved father last year and breaking up with her girlfriend she felt as though her feet no longer touched the ground. Everything that was once so familiar was now gone. She’d been single for almost a year now, finding her own way in the world she wanted to create for herself. And so this magic little space enveloped her in its embrace.

‘So what are you going to do?’ Zoe asked with a smile as she sat down next to Katie. 

Zoe knew Katie so well she didn’t need to ask too much to know that she was thrown. 

Katie couldn’t contain herself anymore.

Lucie, Lucie, Lucie….

That’s all she could think of all the time!! She woke up and Lucie was the first person to cross her mind, she had a coffee and thought of Lucie, she tried to work thinking of Lucie and went to bed thinking of Lucie. 

Lucie played like a record spinning in her head that she couldn’t turn off. And yet just three short weeks ago there was not a thought of Lucie other than thinking of her fondly as a friend. No insanity, no need to question everything she believed about life and love and existence. 

How in three short weeks could she go from needing total and complete freedom to non stop daydreaming about Lucie.

Zoe grinned with her all knowing smile ‘Thinking about Lucie again?’

“Maybe….” Katie smirked back nursing her black coffee. She found it almost impossible to lie to her in any way.

Katie had made the mistake of confessing her overwhelming feelings for Lucie to Katie just a few days earlier as they sat together in the evening sun. 

Not that sharing with Zoe was a mistake but once the secret was out she had opened the door to inviting all of this into the reality of words and action. Katie felt so excited to talk about Lucie. She felt like she was so alive, so turned on, so electric.

The thought of taking action…..

“I’m going to tell her how I feel. I have to” Katie said with her face in her hands in some sort of feeble attempt to keep her emotions from exploding out all over the coffee shop table for everyone to see.

Zoe laughed. “If it feels right then I’m happy for you.”

Did it feel right? Was it the right thing to do? You’ll never know unless you try….. Katie’s internal monologue was relentless. She had always been a hopeless romantic but this felt next level even for her.

Katie couldn’t sit still any longer. She said her goodbyes to Zoe and the other regulars in The Hit. She walked along in the warm summer air, following the river and into the forest to be alone with her thoughts of the last few weeks and this veil that had been lifted.

‘Ok’ thought Katie. ‘Let's go back to the beginning. What happened? How did this happen? How did I not see this before?’

It all started with a simple invite to a tarot card reading. 

Katie’s sister had asked her to go. Mel, always a force of nature, was hard to say no to. And so she had gone against her will, against her gut feeling that something huge was about to happen.  All she was doing was going for a simple one off tarot reading with her sister.

“It’ll be fun”, said Mel. Nothing to be taken too seriously. And so Katie acquiesced and agreed to go. 

Katie had broken up with her long term girlfriend Eva a year ago. They had enjoyed a magical relationship together. Very beautiful, very in love and very happy together, until all of a sudden everything started to change.

When Katie’s dad died it highlighted many cracks in their relationship and after a painful year they both consciously realized that they had outgrown each other. 

Still as Katie sat in front of this reader she hadn’t fully let go of her ex girlfriend. She still held the shadow of what they had together. She knew very clearly that she had made the right decision and that they had outgrown each other, painful as it was to say goodbye. But 10 years is a long time and she still felt very attached to the past. Still felt like the cord had not been cut. But at the same time she felt so confident and free walking her path. She knew she was moving in the right direction. She was a happy, beautiful, intelligent woman who was so excited to live her life and had finally had all the time she needed to build confidence in herself and invest in all the things she loved doing.

Katie sat in front of this woman, Inca, unassumingly hopeful but with no expectation of what she was about to experience and all that would transpire in the months that followed.

‘Hi’ she said to Inca. 

Inca asked if she had ever experienced a reading with her before to which Katie responded no. And so began the most expansive mind blowing 90 minutes of her life. The most incredibly enlightening and freeing conversation that broke all the barriers that had been holding her back in her life. 

Inca jumped right in without a word being uttered from Katie's mouth. She read her life as though reading from a story book. Described what had happened between her & Eva in such depth of detail and clarity that Katie was overwhelmed.

She said she wanted to describe two people she could see. One of whom was clearly Eva and the other being someone Katie hadn't fully gotten to know yet. Someone who had entered the arena of her life. Eva described this other person in great detail. How they clicked together in every possible way. How beautiful this person was both inside and out, the happiness they would know together, the freedom they would always allow for each other to grow. She urged Katie that when the time came to make a choice that this other person was her soulmate.

As Inca spoke tears ran down Katie's face. She had opened the floodgates that so badly needed to be open, to flow. Everything she said about Eva resonated with her. And hearing all of this was the closure that Katie needed to fully let Eva go and process her feelings finally for the end of this beautiful relationship. At that moment, on that day she couldn’t take in anything about this ‘soulmate.’ The thought of someone else being her soulmate felt completely alien to her.

She walked out the door in a daze. It was over. It was all finally over.

Inca had opened her eyes. And now she couldn’t close them no matter how hard she tried.

She walked home, got into bed and cried. She stayed there for 2 whole days feeling like the news had just hit home that her and Eva were really truly over.

 Her friends couldn't understand what was going on. They had been broken up for almost a year already so how was this reaction happening now?

But Inca had done more than read fortune. She had shed an ocean of light and had offered her the opportunity to accept and truly heal.

On the evening of the third night of feeling complete doom and darkness Katie got into bed almost scared to wake up feeling the same way again the next morning. 

But the next morning everything was different. Everything was new. Everything was magic. 

She opened her eyes and sat up with a jolt.

LUCIE!

All of a sudden all she could see was Lucie. Inca had lifted a veil by allowing her to fully process and let go of Eva.

Katie jumped out of bed. The air felt electric. She flung open the curtains to see a lightning strike light up the sky. She felt like the universe was in direct alignment with how she was feeling inside. Lightning had struck. She felt the electric discharge between the sky and the ground and she was fully awake.

It’s Lucie. It’s always been Lucie. How had she not seen it before? Now it all appeared crystal clear before her. All of a sudden this face that she had seen almost everyday for the last year was the most beautiful face she had ever seen. Her blue eyes, her long black wavy hair that she twirled in her fingers when she was nervous, the way her jumper fell off her arm in an incredibly sexy way.

Katie looked around the living room in her apartment and saw that all of her favorite things in that room had been gifted to her by Lucie in the last year. She’d never noticed before that no-one else had gotten her gifts that she loved so much. 

Katie got ready with a sense of urgency. She looked outside at the lightning storm one last time before heading into work where she would see her for the first time since everything had changed.

Katie’s shift started just before Lucie. She waited, butterflies dancing in her stomach, her heart beating faster. What she wanted to say felt so unutterable.

Lucie walked in and their eyes locked immediately. The air felt thick with electrical charge.

The urgency within her was so all encompassing that she thought it almost impossible not to rush towards Lucie, take her face in her hands and feel the surge move between their open mouths. Those lips held the answer to a thousand questions.

‘We are only alive to the degree to which we are willing to be annihilated’. Katie thought. 

Lightning had struck and she knew she must act now.

You’ll never know unless you try…..