I had a soulmate once. I suppose you always have a soulmate even before you’re together and after you separate. You never really lose each other, your time together on earth might just have been completed. Or maybe you’ll reconnect later. This is a story that spans twenty one years, it’s pretty incredible. *sniffles.
Let’s go back to 1994. I’m a chubby, freckled student with an amazing thick golden brown fringed bob (Sun-In blonding spray, anyone?) That year I bought my first album ‘Kiss from a Rose’ by Seal, the song from the Batman Forever soundtrack. My mother told me one afternoon that I was going to ‘The Night of The Stars’ at Movie World with my bestie and her mother. And little naive me assumed we would be looking at actual stars in the sky. If I had known I was attending the World Premier of ‘Batman Forever’ (think George Clooney, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey and Uma Thurman). I would have dressed up and at least worn my pastel butterfly clips and my paua and silver letter ‘K’ pendant on a black leather necklace from Crazy Clarkes. Instead, I had wet hair from the shower and jean cut offs and a baggy tee.
Chris O’Donnell (Robin) had jumped out of a limousine and bee-lined to ME first to sign an autograph in my Hello Kitty Autograph Book my mother had slid into my backpack. I had stumbled as I tried to talk to him (‘Gumby’ is my middle name) but he was patient and made me feel so special.
I was a self conscious kid but my two best friends since I was 3 and 4 years old were always with me and going to school with them was a dream. They are still my besties now that we are in our forties. We’ve been through a lot as you can imagine in 38 years together. But in 1994 they really had their work cut out for them to get me through the heartbreak and the humiliation of Trevor, my crush, who ditched me in the eleventh hour as his Square Dance partner. Thank goodness for Dean who saved my ego, took my hand and danced with me on assessment day so I didn’t fail. (A Dancing Dean will always have my back, it seems!)
A prac teacher joins our Year Six class, it’s his first prac. He’s there one day a week for six weeks and then maybe for a full week. I can’t speak to him, I’m too Gumby. He’s 20 years old. I have this feeling in my entire torso and I don’t understand what it means. All I know is, when he has his final day and he gives everyone in the class a sticker, I feel my eyes start to prickle and my nose start to run as I hold my silver and purple sticker in my chubby hands. I run to the toilets and sob. My besties find me in the bathroom and they are very confused as to why I’m crying so much. ‘He just…..he just looks so much like Chris O’Donnell’ I explain. They are just as confused as I am and I ask if we could not EVER talk about this again. At home I cry into my pillow. (It is weird. I am weird. Not going to lie.) I don’t think that I ever thought about him again. (But I did actually send Chris O’Donnell a love letter by mail. He never responded, but to be fair I have moved a lot and I’ve never been great at mail re-direction…)
21 years later, it’s 2015. I’m making a film and I put a call out on facebook for any musicians who can donate music to my project. One of my kindy mum friends tags a dude in the comments and my ears prick up a little…I recognise the name but can’t think where I know it from…. I click on his profile and my jaw drops when I realise who it is.
It’s him. My Chris O’Donnell look alike! And OH BOY has he aged like a fine wine? I flick through his photos and it’s OBVIOUS…. HE’S my FUTURE HUSBAND. I am in shock and I’m giddy and that feeling fills my torso again. What the actual hell? Oh, there it is. My stomach sinks. A photo captioned ‘My wife and I’.
Well, that’s fine, silly me, I seem to think every man with a beard is my Husband. BUT it’s still MAGIC that we’ve been re-connected doing something that I love (that’s the lesson of life, right? Do what makes you happy and all will be revealed!) Perhaps his role in my life is to provide the soundtrack to my film? What a cool story!
I respond to her comment and say something like ‘gasp! 1994! Such and Such State School!’ and he replies something like ‘Yeah, I did a prac there around that time…I’ll add you.’ I accept his friend request, we chat for a bit about my project before he decides it’s easier to call….and then…there it is…. He’s newly separated… I am THRILLED. I’m 32 years old and he’s 42 and he has absolutely NO memory of me as a student (and is secretly mortified that I had a crush on him at the age his daughter is now). I know it wasn’t just a crush, it was a soul KNOWING. This was SOMETHING.
He had actually died and was brought back to life on a hospital bed two months before we met again in our midlife. This gave him an incredible insight and presence and purpose in his everyday life as a spiritual healer, teacher and musician. We chat all day long for a week or two and we just GET each other. He invites me to a party on a farm on the Mountain with his musician friends. We awkwardly hug before we sit on a fence beside eachother and a Donkey bites my thigh and rips a hole in my jeans. We laugh but then avoid eachother for most of the night. Our eyes keep finding each other and resting in them. I’m in awe listening to him and his friends, jamming around the bonfire. That night, we tell eachother we love eachother as we make love for the first time. It just is. We just are.
For four months it is absolutely blissful. He’s a reiki master, he’s a conscious cook, our children get along beautifully (and are the same ages) and we are aligned on so many levels. I head to New Zealand to nurse my grandfather to his death. There, I buy my lover a souvenir, a beautiful green stone looking Koru from my homeland, one I desperately want to keep for myself. But obviously, one day we will be married and live together so I give it to him knowing that one day it will be ours on our shelf in our gorgeous timber cottage.
Whenever I’d say ‘please be safe’ when we’d part, as I didn’t want to risk losing him again, he’d reply ‘I think I’ll take a risk instead?’ The gift of dying teaches you to push the envelope a little more in the life of experience and this is one saying I now say to myself and to my children. ‘Take a risk! I love you!’
One day, we are swimming in the local river. He’s absolutely beautiful with my kids and he’s out far in the water with my son and I’m just melting watching them together. He is just the kind of man I want my children to get to know. ‘Are you wanting to get married?’ he asks later, as we lie drying off in the sun with my head on this chest, playing with his beard. ‘Yeah, I’ve always wanted that experience. I just hadn’t found the right person to do it with yet.’ I’m stunned and delighted to be having this conversation.
‘I’d love to marry you, Karleigh.’ He says, looking deeply into my eyes. I relax into the moment but suddenly, there’s a but. ‘But I’ve only just recently left my wife. I’m not even divorced. I’ve been a husband for twenty two years. Twenty two years of doing the right thing for the family, for the wife, for the kids.’ Here it is, the break up speech is coming out of nowhere. Awesome. Of course that a good thing can’t last.
‘When I died, I begged God as I went towards the light, to let me go back to my wife. But I kept going. So I begged him to let me go back to my kids. But I kept going. Then I begged him to let me go back and I promised I would do what I came to earth to do, you know, my purpose. Suddenly I was back in my body. I can’t be your husband in this life, I’m so sorry. Maybe I can do it in the next one.’ The familiar hot tickle of tears in my eyes and the runny nose hits me like it did back in 1994, gaddammit. I nod, I understand. I just want him to be happy. He’s SO beautiful. He’s not actually breaking up with me, he’s just giving me the heads up. We can just go back to how we were before this conversation, can’t we?
Sadly I’m hurting. I run into a story of fear instead of sitting with it, taking time to process, instead of talking through it with him. I know my worth, I tell myself. And I have waited around for men before. And I fucking LOVE this man. Like, maybe more than I have ever loved a man before. And I’ve loved A LOT. But this KNOWING, this longing for him…. was in my body before I even understood what love was! Before I even knew who I was!
I defiantly decide I’m seeking the type of connection where someone looks me in the eyes and declares ‘I want to be your husband in THIS life. We are journeying this one TOGETHER’ and I need to feel it too. (I can’t stand it when advice tells us to find the man that wants us, the one that treats us like a Queen. There doesn’t seem to be any mention of finding the man who treats you like a Queen who YOU want to treat like a KING! It MUST be reciprocal or don’t even bother. Trust me. I’ve tried allllll the combinations!)
I decide I am going elsewhere to find my husband, my king and I am going to find my happily ever after. I’d also been advised before that when someone tells you who they are, you should listen. My lover is deeply shocked when I end the relationship with him. How can I? We are very clearly soulmates. Very clearly meant to be. Some women advised me then that maybe this was the wake up call he needed to man up and propose! So stupid, he wasn’t out of line. What he was saying was no indication that I wasn’t worthy of marrying.
Within a very short amount of time, he was in a committed relationship again. Did I fuck us up? I hadn’t been ready to marry him at four months either but I assumed we were working towards that…. maybe he was scared by the strength of our connection and how beautifully our families were blending, how easy it all was. I’d be frightened too if I’d been married for twenty two years and found such deep connection so soon after….. Maybe I should have just smiled and nodded when he said he couldn’t marry me in this life and he would have relaxed and it would have happened eventually. How long had I known he was someone significant for me? Maybe he just needed space to feel respected and listened to, and still given his time to recover from everything he had experienced in 6 months of dying, coming back to life, ending his marriage and finding me… maybe he just needed time to feel freedom… or maybe I too was scared….of what this incredible ease and alignment felt like after a lifetime of struggle in relationships. Maybe I had self sabotaged and derailed my life and my happiness after all?
In 2018 I quit dating and began fostering a little boy who shared his name and I thought that was a cute little acknowledgement to our connection. This Universe is SO clever! As I began the process to apply to adopt him, my soulmate/ex lover (who was also adopted) reaches out to meet me in the hospital where my baby is being treated, and offers to give him some healing reiki. We had been in hospital for four long months at this stage. Seeing the man I once and still loved, holding my new baby, gazing into his eyes and healing him is a vision I hold so dearly. Maybe I had confused a vision of us sitting together holding a baby to be ‘ours’? Either way, the moment felt very poignant. My ex lover moves interstate to be with his partner.
A year or so later, I weirdly live two streets away from where we first got together on the Mountain. I’m still a foster carer, living in a gorgeous pink and black timber Aframe home with a fireplace, my two kids, two foster kids, three cats, six chickens and a pet snake named Willie Nelson. It’s a dreamy existence. But I haven’t written anything for my novel in years. I follow the impulse to hire a babysitter to give me a couple of hours to go to a nice restaurant and write. It’s Covid times, there’s not many restaurants open. I check in with myself and my gut yells at me ‘The Mexican Restaurant!’ so there I head. There’s hardly any people in the restaurant. I’m just getting into my groove, feeling myself as I write and nibble on my gluten free churro when I look up and at the far end of the room I see someone him shaped. That can’t be him? I query. But we find eachother’s eyes and…indeed it’s him. I feel my face a flush with amazement that again, I find him when I’m doing what I love, what I’m meant to be doing.
He excuses himself from his dinner with his friend, we embrace and he sits down next to me. ‘What are you doing up here?’ I gasp, knowing he’s not meant to have crossed any borders from the state that he lives in.
‘I have something for you,’ he says.
‘What??! What do you mean?’ He leads me towards his car that’s parked near my table. He takes out a tissue wrapped gift from the passenger seat and pauses.
‘I got married, Karleigh.’
‘What?! That’s amazing! Congratulations!’ I cover my mouth with my hands.
‘And I was packing up my old life to move down south with my wife and I found this and I didn’t want to throw it away because I know how much it meant to you. I knew I’d see you again and figured I’d bump into you up here.’ He handed me the present and I unwrapped it to reveal my New Zealand Koru and my hand raised to cover my mouth again, those familiar tears prickling.
I don’t know how he knew but it makes sense with who we were and how we started that we would have a conscious severance of our connection like this. Having lost soulmates to death before, it’s a very beautiful thing to experience an awakened, aware, acknowledging adieu as we did. We haven’t seen eachother since.
Then it became clear, I didn’t fuck up by ending us when I did. We were just getting eachother ready to be ready. We were fostering eachother, getting eachother ready for our next stages of evolution. He may have found his forever home already, who knows ? Maybe I’ll never marry. He wasn’t just my teacher, we were eachother’s. And I don’t know about him, but this relationship (like my others) continues to teach me new perspectives and understandings as I evolve and experience my life.
I don’t think you can really fuck things up. Yes, you can get sick of your own self sabotaging eventually, or you’ll get sick of meeting the same person in different meat carcasses and once you accept and learn the repetitive lesson, you’ll level up and meet entirely different beings. Like those guys who used to be your type? You’re never attracted to them again.
The amazing partner I have now? I couldn’t have met him any earlier, he’s been married for over a decade. He needed some time to learn how to be himself in a relationship and himself on his own. He wasn’t the perfect partner for me in 2015 when I thought I was the perfect partner and I thought I was ready for marriage. He needed time to marinate in his own life experience and pickle and turn into this delicious snack that he is, ready to meet me now, the wonderful partner/snack that I am today.
I’m the one who actually needed ten years to learn
a) not to throw the baby out with the bathwater over a conversation about marriage #basic
b) it’s okay to be still and be here right now in a beautiful relationship instead of planning a future that doesn’t/cannot guarantee healthy stability or future happiness.
c) to let go & accept that marriage may or may not ever be on the cards for me in this life. d) how delicious it is to not have a crystal ball?
e) how wonderful it is to not have someone marry me because I gave them an ultimatum?
But the magic is in taking the risk. You’re alive, yeah? Go take a risk, follow that dream, follow that impulse, you never know who you’ll meet and what they have to teach you.
Because just quietly, Chris O’Donnell (I know you’re reading this) – there’s no ring on my finger, there’s still time for us yet….x
Swings & Roundabouts 