Twin Flames

A retelling.

There are two kinds of twin flame relationships. In any case, they still change the course of your life, whether you are ready for them or not. The flavor of those relationships is highly dependent on lived experience and how much accountability each person involved is willing to take.

This is the theme of agency in fate: the gods can get you set up with all the right resources but unless you take the actions to utilize them, then the potential is unrealized. I told one guy once, I don’t date potential.

There are many different approaches to what is a twin flame bond. Sometimes people refer to them as your “ideal mate” or your “other half”. Sometimes it’s karma, which that in and of itself has a lot of issues as a term. Inherited, kismet, fate - all words to describe something that transcends time and space. Past lives, parallel lives, different bodies, different everything except you and that soul have been together multiple times. Almost always romantically, regardless of the paradigm you are in, the season, the gender roles, the physical bodies you inhabit each time.

Having this kind of relationship with someone sounds magical, overwhelming, star-crossed, romantic AF, Romeo and Juliet status. Well, those two died, as well as many other ones.

One would argue that the healthy, enlightened relationship is the one that overcomes its fatedness and breaks all rules and trite actions of romance. Nobody dies, nobody gets hurt, you support each other in becoming, overcoming, and getting stronger together. Which is also possible in my opinion.

Others may disagree or have their own observations. Again, I am no expert in twin flames, but I’ve had my fair share of experience with them and I think it’s a term that neo-spiritualists overuse. It’s most often that you are hooking up with someone from a past life (like really when is it a fully unknown person?) and the Twin Flame shit can be magical but most of the time it’s hard and toxic AF. It requires SO MUCH of you and you better own up to it or it’s GONE.

Which is where most mortals fail.

The short version was discussed on my podcast.

Here’s this lifetime’s story.

I was 22, he was 31. We met at work. The details of the daily life don’t matter as much at this point in time. They mattered for a long time because we were entangled, and it was messy, and painful, and harrowing while we were living through it. The details used to matter because we used to see them so differently. He compartmentalized. I was the connective tissue. That matter of perspective is very difficult to overcome.

I was 22 and depressive even though the worst things hadn’t happened yet. I was out of college and eager to join the grown up world but couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with my life. I had a hair wrap I got on a Greek island. I wore all patterns all at once and I walked around barefoot a lot. I was a ginger and insecure and scared but nobody could tell. I landed in a wild job with a wild crew and a wild life.

He was 31, a metalhead (ew), super picky and clean. Literal opposites. He oozed sex appeal which is something even women who did not find him attractive agreed upon.

Our relationship was a working one, even though I thirsted for him. I never imagined he would look at me. I was not his type. Then Odysseus died. And I did not have any tools to handle the grief or to feel my feelings or anything like it. We were out one night late after work and I started crying. He held me and he told me he would help me forget about the pain.

We had sex the first time at the office party in a back room. We were drunk, I made eggnog and it fucked up everyone. He hesitated but I was so naive and so into him that I assumed if we did it then we would just be together and things would be chill. I was very very mistaken.

The next time we had sex we actually hung out first. Magical synchronicities led to him inviting me over for dinner, he cooked, but the stove stopped working. Something that tends to happen when I’m nervous and around electricity. He was nervous too actually. He was real mad at the electricity that night.

I have still, to this day, never had sex like I did with him. I felt like my entire skin was alive with a buzzing energy, a hook inside my heart tugging on an invisible rope attached to his heart. The intensity was too much from the first moment we acted on the physical attraction. I am generally pretty inhibited, I’m not like chill and DTF, I’m a bit of a control freak and I prioritize comfort. Not with him though. With him I didn’t care at all. It was as if my physical form dissolved and I was one with the cosmic energy, not being able to identify inhibitions or locations, whether someone could see us, whether we were public or private, whether I was loud or not. I didn’t care. If he wanted to fuck me in the middle of the town square I’d let him and then come out of the trance and have no idea why people were staring.

Thus started a story of lifetimes being played out in this one. We were hiding and he was secretive. He was cheating and fucking around and so I was I, but I was more discreet about it. I ached for him on the nights he ignored me and was out partying. I wrote spells and hexes but I didn’t bind him. I didn’t have to. We were already bound.

One night he asked me to pull a tarot card. He smirked. I didn’t get to see the card. He told me later that that’s when he knew we’d be together forever.

When I told her this, my healer asked me “What is the difference between white and black magic? Consent.” I didn’t get it. He owned me entirely. He didn’t need consent. For anything. I wanted it all. The pain, the heartache, the attention, the worship, the attachment, the fighting, the sex, the love. I pulled his bedroom door off the hinges and he threw me to the ground and started kicking me. It was a dangerous game. A dangerous affair. A dangerous love. Danger. Driving in the car drunk, picking fights with strangers, picking fights with each other, fucking in the alleys of the city, on the train tracks, in cars, before the train takes us out, before another one sees us, before I need to give him up again to love someone else even if it was temporary.

I was someone I can’t even recognize now. I would scream and cry and drink and do any drug that showed up around me. I went to shows and made out with randos and fucked randos behind bars just to get back at him for all the pain. He hit me that one time yes and he shouldn’t have and he apologized many many years later - something I did not believe he was capable of doing. But then again, people change. I see pictures of me at that time, pictures of the blond 20 something with the animal print and the vinyl pants, the leather boots and the dead eyes. Funnily enough, that’s what he always loved about me. My eyes.

I told him I loved him whenever I could. I knew love was infinite. I thirsted for his love. He told me he loved me measured, with a teaspoon. He thought love was finite and if you abuse it it will run out. What a pained existence. How could love run out when it was obvious we had done this so many times? So many lifetimes? Hades, Persephone, the pomegranates, the underworld. Light and dark, maiden and crone, powerful gods, death, destruction, Tartarus and the Elysian Fields - we had it all. We contained multitudes. Multitudes conceived in bloodshed.

At some point I kept getting a vision of stabbing him with one of the knives sitting in the block on the kitchen counter. We drank a lot of red wine and fucked on the floor and on the walls not caring about who was ruined in the process. Especially if it was us. Because we deserved it.

I felt unloved because he couldn’t claim me outside the house. He felt unloved because I was slippery. Thus the vicious cycle continued. In a never ending loop of pain and need.

I thought for sure, one of us is going to kill the other. One of us will end up dead and one of us in prison for a crime of passion. Chances were I would be the dead one.

My other best alternative would have been barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen.

I asked for liberation because I felt so disempowered and so broken. So lost. So fucked over by life and love and work and spirit. Actually this was the time when I didn’t believe in anything outside matter. Not even us. I believed in nothing. I only knew I had to get out because it would one day come down to me or him.

So I left.

He was angry. I abandoned him, he says to this day.

He did nothing to stop me. We spent those last 3 months before I left in harrowing conditions. Me trying to break up with him again, trying to find a semblance of self. Him pursuing me with renewed passion, not letting me leave his life, just the location. I kept oscillating between trying to get away and terrified I was making the biggest mistake of my life. But my perseverance held strong somehow.

He came by the US with a tour 3 months after I had moved to the Bay. We spent a few days together, not in the Bay. It was lovely and horrible. He hid me from everyone. The cycle of pain continued. He never actually came to visit me, to see my life there at any point. I think he felt that if he was in it, it would be real, and then I would be really gone. Our chance, gone. But he never took aligned action. He kept himself a big fish in a small pond. What felt like safety. I was too risky for him. Mustang he called me. Untamable.

I went back to the life I was starting to build and slowly I stopped talking to him. He was like a drug. I would block him and then unblock him and talk to him, become disappointed, block him again. The length of time I spent blocking him kept getting longer and longer. Like an addict, I would only count the time until the next relapse.

The relapses started happening after longer stretches of time more and more. I saw him once, 18 months after I had moved out of the country. We spent the day together and though the hook in the heart was there, it felt less intense that time.

I ended up speaking to him maybe once a year. In the time that I was away he quit smoking, started running, watching his diet and his health. He got fit.

A few years later he told me he had a kid.

I almost died. I felt my heart bleed. It was a physical sensation. The pain of him never having come for me, never claiming me as his but instead doing something this permanent with another woman. A woman with straight hair, who wasn’t a Mustang, who stayed, who maybe he didn’t love the same way because he did still love me but loving more than me was too painful. So this felt safe for him.

Your girl is lovely Hubble.

I spiraled into a deep depression that I didn’t even notice. I barely survived it. I thank my friends and my community for saving my life - that time and the times before that. The times my friends scraped me off the city streets and carried me to the hospital or their couch or their bed, holding me while I cried or puked or shook uncontrollably with the inability to process this love, this pain, this intolerable unworthy existence. Who fed me and gave me clothes and a hot shower and made sure I didn’t take the razor to my flesh again, who took turns making sure I wasn’t alone, who invited me out of bed and into the city, a walk on the beach, through the park, back into the world.

I saw him again, a year later. It had been 5 years since I had seen him, since we spent the day together in his house. I could no longer visit his house. There was another woman there and a child, a daughter. We would have had a son, I knew that. I knew the name of our never-conceived child. We had agreed on it on one of those drunken nights. Drunk on each other most of all. Intoxicated by passion, slowly poisoned because the doses were not homeopathic; they were too much too fast, the center could never hold.

I saw him and we talked and he apologized - for hitting me, for hurting me. He demanded my apology for abandoning him. I did not offer it. I could not. I saved myself, I chose myself. I could not, would not become a shell in order for him to be happy. I needed to live - not just survive. That’s the lesson I took from Ody - I needed to live, to thrive, to create the life I was worthy of living. Not staying in a dark apartment in the center of a city, barefooted and a mother while he was out doing gods know what.

I did not apologize for my thriving life, my healing for which he had no part in. The cord cutting and the energy clearings and all the burnt plants in the world would not shed him from my system. All the dreamwork, the belladonna, the ghosts formula the witch gave me - none of it worked. All I could do was focus - on me, on love, on choosing men that did not remind me of him, of how he made me feel. I chased that high for years, it got me into trouble, it hurt others, it hurt me, I almost died so many times. I made it though. I made it but I didn’t feel like I was making it. I missed him. I wanted him. I wanted him to pick me like he did that other woman.

He did, that night. He picked me. In the car, on the train tracks, with the train rushing towards us, the city lights simultaneously obscuring us and blessing us. There would be light.

I threatened to tell her. I felt like all the work I’d done to rid him had failed and I was back to square one. He didn’t want to hurt her, he said. He didn’t want her to know because she would be hurt. Because he loved me. Stay with your wife I said. She’s not my wife. I never married her. That spot is yours.

I didn’t tell her. I went back to my cabin in the woods and made better decisions. I saw him again two months later. He insisted. It would have been our 9 year anniversary. He was a romantic. He keeps a ring for me, somewhere, when I’m ready, when he will feel safe enough, when I will no longer be a Mustang running free in the stretches of North America and the world.

We fought. It ended badly. It was deja vu. The heart hook being pulled at, torn, left bleeding, the crying so familiar, so soothing, so bitter. No sweetness this time. Just bitterness. For all we did to each other.

I met my soulmate. The person I worked so hard towards. The person who saw the broken me, the entire me, and held me, all of me. The one who saw the wildness, and the pain, the fear and the overcoming of it. He is with me because we choose each other every day. He sets me free consistently and I stay because my breath is easy, the love is easy and full, I can sleep through the night without missing him and when I do he is right there. I can cry to him about Ody and about him, the man who tried to love me but could not and who sent me to the other side of the world, to find myself, my path, and my life’s mate.

I have crises every now and then.

It’s not easy. It takes hard work and commitment to myself, my growth, and the life I desire in order to not succumb.

There have been a few close calls. A few too many phone calls. A few run ins but always in public surrounded by others. No alcohol, no substances, no music. Just us, in the world, in the open, in the daytime, in the light. I think we can’t hide it because when we talk, people stare at us, from one to the other, ping-ponging, like watching a tennis match.

I remember why I loved him in the first place. Before it all happened. Before we nearly destroyed each other and everything and everyone around us. Don’t get me wrong, we destroyed enough of ourselves that I wasn’t sure we would ever fill out those holes. We destroyed enough of others that I’m not sure I can ever actually repent for what I’ve done, the harm I’ve caused, the actions I took when I was driven mad by a love that was all-consuming.

We talked a lot for a minute, around the time that would have been our 13 year anniversary. There was more accountability, and recognition, and closure. The kind of closure I didn’t think I would ever get. Like the fact that we felt the parallel life we were living in a different timeline, if we had made different decisions. Or that I would be a great stepmom to the daughter that came from the skies due to a synchronicity and not a choice. Knowing that was balm to my abandoned heart. That I would redecorate the apartment, and there would be space for me where previously there was none. That I had taken up the most space in his heart, life, and soul than anyone ever had or even has since.

That if I asked him, he would leave her. That I could show him I have the strength to handle him and he doesn’t need to push me.

I could feel that reality, I could taste it, smell it, reach out and take it.

But I don’t want it.

I want the reality I am in, the one where I have a partner for whom I did not have to break myself but only make myself a better version of me. The one where I am not confined to a small country somewhere in the mediterranean but I get to travel the world and help people and make cool art and write about the pain and the struggle it took to get here.

Was it worth it?

Yeah. It could maybe have been a little fucking easier and next time I die I will take this story to the librarians and say “The debt is paid, the karma is resolved, there are no more agreements to be upheld with this soul. Please do not put us back together. We are done.” and have it feel like the resounding truth.

Unfortunately it doesn’t fully feel this way. I hope we are done. But I am still uncertain.