She kissed him goodbye, knowing he wouldn’t remember her tomorrow…

But as their soft, sensitive lips touched, something magical erupted within their souls. A fire so intense that even the heavens couldn’t shield themselves from the intensity of the energetic release.

In that moment, her memory flooded with vivid images and feelings she had forgotten, just in that single, final goodbye kiss; their souls awakened in ways only the divine would understand. The sensation of being playful like a child, sensual like a hungry desire, calm like a glass-topped lake, warmth like a cozy cottage in the wintertime, home.

A single, salty-hot tear ran down his cheek from his closed eyelid that hid away the most intense, soulful chestnut eyes. Eyes so intensely deep, reflections of yourself could be seen reflecting your own soul. The kind of eyes you could get so lost in that nothing could interrupt the calmness that washed over the raging thoughts or the chaos of the world. Those kinds of eyes that sparked something foreign within parts of the soul only you could feel.

Silently wishing to see them one last time, as the soft heat left my trembling lips. Slowly pulling away, staring at the disheveled mess of dark locks peppered with strands of silvery-white. Giggling softly, remembering his playful banter about denying the evidence of aging. Smiling at the soft stubble, shading over the handsome features that he subconsciously denied because he didn’t see himself the way I did.

I would always remember that little boy on the playground, strutting over to me, playing by myself in the dirt while the other kids laughed and carried on during recess. That was our first meeting, short-lived, because that same weekend we moved to another school district. Our second meeting, well, encounter, was in middle school.

I saw him first.

Dressed in worn carpenter jeans, plain tee, it was maroon, his white sneakers stained with dirt, but his smile struck something deep within. Even after six years, I recognized that same boy from the playground. My heart did cartwheels remembering those two moments in my life, two very special moments.

The third time, well, seventeen years can change people a lot, and I mean, a LOT.

But from me to whoever, I don’t regret any of it. The really good, and the really bad moments, because for those seventeen years apart, I experienced everything a relationship was NOT!! But just in a single text asking if they could call, and the not-so-polite greeting of “Where the Fuck! Have you been?”, changed the direction of both our lives.

The saying, “Time just picked right up from where we left off”, is so true in many ways, but we both fucked up.

I had more time to process and heal from past trauma, so I thought, and he failed at being consistent and open in communication about our relationship, which, in turn, triggered both of us. I understood that he had just served time, missing out on the birth of his son, finding out that the mother of his child and his wife at the time had abandoned his son and her daughter from a previous relationship for drugs and men.

Me, being me, I wanted to give him what had been robbed from him, but I pushed when I should have pulled back, and he ran and avoided when things started to get heavy between us. Because of my already started healing journey and reconnecting to my spirituality, I felt every shift in energy, which in turn caused me to reflect that energy, and not all good either. The bad energy triggered my trauma wounds, and having the safety of him in my life, I word vomited so much, not stopping to consider how my words made him feel.

Turns out, I made him feel stupid, not heard, de-masculinized, and it triggered parts of him he had buried and ran from for years. My little smartass jabs, actually hurt him in different ways, but I didn’t know because he never said anything.

He never said anything because I responded to his corrections defensively, not because of him, but because of hidden emotional and mental trauma buried under what I thought I had healed, turns out, healing isn’t just a once go and be done. It’s a consistent, steady shedding of energetic layers in different variations of your healing journey. Just like the stages of anything in life, there are stages of healing, the hardest one being childhood.

That’s where our journey together shifted direction.

I felt his energy pulling back, so I pushed, but he started responding differently, which triggered my insecurities of not being good enough, doubting, overthinking, and overlooking the signs. I was so focused on my healing journey and building something with my Best Friend that I made him feel invisible.

Let me tell you why that’s so significant in this final Goodbye.

Throughout our history together, I was privy to his darkest secrets and feelings. The biggest and deepest was being treated like he was invisible, not wanted, but I always saw him when no one else did, and I told him that all the time when he started shrinking himself from me.

To drive the importance of this, when we were fifteen, he found out that the man he thought was his dad, was not, and the truth about his real dad was shit-washed and twisted from the truth. I saw the goofy, playboy, jokester turn hard and quiet, but not with me. I only got to see the parts of him that he hid away from everyone else. Which brings me back to the day when we finally got to hug for the first time in so many missed years.

It was like our first kiss, but a hug.

A hug felt so deeply that time stopped in that moment, and it was just our souls reconnecting in the physical world, but we were no longer carefree teenagers. This time, we were time-hardened adults that had pushed and fought ourselves through Hell, barely breathing, but somehow managed to find ourselves together, hugging so tightly to one another that we failed each other at the same time.