Fallen Queen

We were so in love.

Our hearts exploded all over one another like stars scattered across the Milky Way. I kissed every inch of your body. I ran my fingers through every strand of your hair and I sucked on each one of your toes. Your tongue discovered every wet place of mine that had never been reached. You even pressed it to my wisdom teeth and while you licked you siphoned poetry into my soul. You made me come alive with your touch. Your hand fit into mine like the latched lock on a buried treasure on the bottom of the sea. When clasped, our hands had a priceless secret between them. A knowing. A truth.

You made me feel like a princess. No, you made me feel like the queen. The queen of the universe. A universe where peace reigns and freedom is the only option. Where marching soldiers shoot arrows of compassion. A universe in which broken hearts don't exist because there is only love. Where tears aren't recognized as sadness because they only come from laughter. Where a child never dies. Where every woman is beautiful and every breast is a perfect handful. Where the soundtrack is the cry of passion and everyone wants to hear it. Where all cities are like New York in the sixties. Where every day is a good hair day. Where every photo is a keeper. Where tumors cause longer eyelashes and smaller pores. Where every family lives in a luxurious home with heated floors and everybody has a swimming pool with a slide. Where sleep arrives effortlessly and only puppies and kittens snore. Where the band is always awesome. Where the coffee is always hot, but not so hot you burn your mouth. Where goldfish have the memory of elephants. Where the vegetables grow from real seeds and you don't have to kill an animal to eat meat. Where the dress always makes my ass look fantastic. Where the biggest argument is over who pays the bill, but there – everyone actually wants to pay. Where babies always sleep through the night. Where bouquets of flowers in vases keep living infinitely. Where farts are always funny and never smell. Where everyone likes to dance. Where every game is won by the underdog. Where no one ever has to be alone and even if you want to be – the space will still give you a hug. Where the good guys always finish first. You made me the queen of that universe.

When we were together, our souls shot out of our fingertips like magic from a wizard's wand and connected like two beams of lightning. We became one. The wrinkles around our eyes grew deeper because all we did was smile. We could have powered all the energy needed for the world with our laughs, magic, and rainbows. Our love caused mountains to grow taller. The peaks swelled up from the earth with the Heavens as their magnet and gravity as a forgotten foe. When I was sad you would rock me like a baby in the arms of my mother. And then everything was perfect. We were learning how to fly.

And then we fell. And then you evaporated. And then I crashed. We wanted to make love in the moonlight but instead, it fucked us. You died in the moonlight. When the executioner slaughtered that day's sun it took you with it. The darkness was supposed to be our dance floor and it ended up being a cemetery. And our bedroom is the morgue. Now our memories don't even rob my dreams instead they are drained from my brain like innocence from a child. You disappear into stardust or sawdust or nothing… I don't know.

I am bound. I'm trapped in this world because I believe if I take my life I won't get to go to the same place as you. I'll be captive on the wrong side of a one-way glass window. And I'm too scared to leave. And I don't really want to. I just want you back.

I want you back so we can press our hands into wet concrete and leave an impression for the future. I want you back so when I do my yoga, I can reach for your outstretched fingers instead of a box of tissue. I want you back so I can hold your sisters in a hug of love rather than needing them as a brace to hold me up from crumpling onto the floor as my knees give out. I want you back so we can talk to your mother on Bluetooth while we're driving through the mountains. I want to hear her smile on the other side of the line call you Bubs and you call her Mud. I want to hand her a grandchild in a polka-dotted blanket that looks half like you, half like me, and one-hundred percent like an angel. I want to watch you play catch in the front yard with our little boy and not know who is actually the kid because you will always be my Peter Pan.

Now I imagine sixty more years of life with my head looking backwards over my shoulder remembering the time I carried pixie dust. Dreaming of the treasure I once had, the man I got to touch every night and was supposed to still be touching. At what was supposed to be. I imagine trading in our castle in the sky for a windowless, basement studio apartment with dingy carpet and yellowed, linoleum countertops. I imagine a future of boredom and faithlessness. A future of stumbling steps because I'm too busy straining my eyes at what once was. I imagine kissless love and touchless nights. I imagine sex that's governed by ovulation dates and once in a while maybe too much tequila. I imagine divorce. I imagine searching for a time machine so I can go back to the day before that night. I imagine looking for God in everything and never being able to find him. Hidden beneath my clothes, I imagine scratching the skin off my bones and ripping my nails out of their beds just to try to feel pain worse than loosing you. But it never comes.

And then someday I'll die. Alone. And disappear into stardust or sawdust or nothing… I don't know.

Labyrinth

This past year at Burning Man, Kevin, you, and I took a ride out to Deep Playa. We were searching for nothing and everything at the same time. We had no plan, which was your favorite way to journey. Far away from the lights and bass of the city, almost to the trash fence, we stumbled upon a labyrinth carved into the earth. It was camouflaged, a facade amongst the clay earth. We headed to the entrance of the maze and began to walk.

The network of paths was narrow and we moved forward in a single file line. At first we moved in silence, one foot in front of the other, moving slowly. Then, we began to talk about unique experiences of our own life-wanderings. We shared, we laughed, we cried, and we walked within the web for a long time.

The labyrinth's network was unclear. We couldn't tell where we were in the system – at times we'd laugh and ask, "Are we even halfway through this?" The mid-point was unrecognizable from our place in the midst of the web. "Is this the beginning, middle or end?" I would ask, impatiently. "It doesn't matter," you would respond, "It could be anything." We continued on our pilgrimage.

Do we ever really know the end from the beginning? What I thought was the beginning for us, turned out to be our last day together. And yet, maybe that terrible night was just the beginning, or maybe a dot within the middle of our own odyssey together through consciousness.

As I sat on Natalia's patio for la comida (a leisurely lunch) this afternoon, the sound of the waves crashing on the shore blended in the distance with Nati's partner, Jaime's classical guitar melody. As I heard the sounds I felt a sense of clairaudience. You are here even in your absence. It's all connected. I suddenly knew. It's all one and the same. As clear as it is that you are not here, it is also clear that you are here.

I heard you in the soulful conversation at lunch. I heard the ideas that you loved to discuss. I heard the music that you loved to create. I saw something out of the corner of my eye and it reminded me of the dream I had last night where you appeared and we had a new adventure together. I saw you in the love of Nati and Jamie. They met not long after we did, but after Natalia told me she was inspired by our love. So, in some ways, we helped foster their love, and therefore, you are inside of them. And I felt it absolutely.

The morning after your death, as I clung to your Aunt Ginny's mattress, trying to ground myself and understand this new emotion – grief – my friend Amirah was the first person to arrive. Her face stained with tears and mind aghast at the tragedy, she simply held space for my devastation. She brought her baby, Sora, with her to the house. As she entered the bedroom, she apologized for bringing the baby. She hadn't been able to find someone to watch her on such short notice. I told her not to worry. I was glad Sora was there, but I didn't know why yet.

As Amirah sat with me, in essence she cradled both her baby and her friend. All of a sudden, Sora, with huge brown eyes of innocence, looked into my grief-stricken eyes and reached out towards me. She grabbed your necklace, which was on my neck. It was the necklace you wore beneath your shirt every day – a wrap that contained both sides of an ammonite nested within a alkaline dust of gold, silver, and burning man ash. It was the necklace that only a few hours before, in the hospital, I'd removed from your neck and placed on mine. The baby reached for the necklace, grasped it in her tiny hand, and looked into my eyes, and I gasped. "Ted is inside of Sora," I told Amirah, "I'm so glad you brought her." It was the first time I saw your spirit in something other than your physical self.

William Blake wrote:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

We are all connected. You are here. You are in the ocean. You are in each grain of sand. You are in my voice. You are in the dog's tongue that kisses my cheek. You are in the conversation I'm having and the one the strangers down the beach are having too. You are in a star that makes up the farthest constellation away from this place. You are in your friends' rituals. You are in the love I offer to myself. You are in your mother's heartbeat.

Quantum physicist, Michael Talbot, who authored your favorite book, The Holographic Universe, says that the energy of a trillion atomic bombs is in every cubic centimeter of space. Space is not empty, as we often see. Instead, it is full. It is more dense than any other matter – a plenum as opposed to a vacuum. So when your soul ascended from your body that night and I watched your spirit leave its physical habitat, you became a part of the fabric of the universe. You became the light. You became time. You became space.

So I continue on my journey. What I thought was the beginning of our life was redefined by the Universe's lesson. Is it the beginning, the middle, or the end? It is all three. Am I alone or among all? I am both. I have learned that placing faith in the future is fruitless. I cannot trust the future – not even this very breath. Though expectations and plans are not entirely futile – they are an important exercise in patience and uncertainty.

For now, I walk with myself on this journey. Myself – which is the sum of everything I am and have been, all I've learned, all my memories, all I love, all I've touched – and I honor this very moment in my understanding of time, this very lesson in my own pilgrimage, and seize an openness to the connectedness of us all, you included, within this labyrinth of consciousness.