“There’s just something about you,” he wrote in a text to me the next day.
The night before, we had been seated across from one another in a dive bar in my then adopted city of Toronto. He was a friend of a friend, he was visiting from Vancouver, my hometown, and, although we were part of a group, I couldn’t tell you how many people were at that table with us, because I was aware only of him.
Eye contact with him made my heart scramble into my esophagus, my pupils holding his for as long as they could before I thought I might choke. My sight dropped to travel the chain around his neck until the metal disappeared into the depths of his white shirt — I wondered what weighed it down to lay against his heart.
When he passed my chair on his way to the restroom, I thought, Touch me. And he did, placing both hands on my shoulders as he walked by. I didn’t need whiskey — our connection was an intoxicant.
I hadn’t felt this level of magnetism in months, possibly, probably, longer.
For the ensuing days, I imagined what it would be like to touch him, kiss him, lie beneath him. I tried to shush the desire, embarrassed by the intense longings I harboured for a man I barely knew. But I couldn’t.
You’re being ridiculous, a constant thought.
You’re a crazy, obsessed person, I reprimanded myself.
He must be the one, my dreams rejoiced.
The infatuation was thrilling. This was the most alive I’d felt since moving to Toronto.
Eighteen months earlier, I had ditched the West Coast in search of connection and belonging, love and excitement. I was feeling increasingly out of sync with life, with myself. I was achingly lonely, despite having a wealth of friends. There had been a sequence of romantic disappointments, frustrations, and shame. And I thought I had hit my ceiling of potential in Vancouver. There were so many sad songs I could play on my tiny violin.
I ran from one side of a continent to another thinking my problems wouldn’t dare follow. Drastic life change was sure to change me — or, at the least, wrench me out of the quicksand swallowing me whole.
Making friends in a city where I knew few proved to be more difficult than I imagined. There should be a questionnaire before one is allowed to move cities. Are you an introvert? Do you work from home? Have you fewer than five acquaintances at your destination? Does anxiety already bubble in your gut? If you answered yes to all of the above, your grand plan to change your place of address is ill advised.
During my second week in Toronto, I tripped while running on a busy lakefront trail. When I slammed into the gravel, my zest was shredded from knees and palms. I sat there on the ground, bleeding, a blur of people walking, jogging, biking around me, and none of them asked if I was okay. That’s when I realized I was alone in a city of millions. I was invisible.
Weeks would fly by where the only face-to-face human interaction I’d have was with someone selling me a tea, a cocktail, or groceries. I lived an isolated pandemic life before the pandemic. Still, I stuck it out. I went solo to concerts, movies, bars, galleries, and other places where people usually went in twos and threes. I’ve always been independent. I’ve done these things alone before — with gusto, no less — and I thought I could handle it. No. Not, really. And then when I did socialize with the handful of people I knew, I wasn’t confident, couldn’t breathe, felt sick.
It wasn’t all dismal all the time. There were moments of laughter and happiness. Hope, even. But those moments began to feel like islands separated by infinite seas. I was growing tired swimming the waters to find them. I was drowning.
Isolation is an agonizing poison. How are we all coping with it now? How are you managing? Are you okay?
Loneliness, depression, and anxiety conspired to coax away my remaining positive thoughts. My hopeful soul withered, and took to cowering somewhere behind the bars of my rib cage. My creativity couldn’t bare the state of its friend, and became jail-mates with my soul. I got hives. My body hurt everywhere. I cried oceans. My cheeks were beds of salt. Like so many fingers now, during a pandemic, my hands ached to touch somebody.
I concealed the extent of my mental ill-health from most, trying to maintain a presence on social media that wouldn’t hint at an increasingly opaque state of mind, pretending to be the passionate, adventurous, nauseatingly dreamy person I was once-upon-not-so-long-ago. But some nights, I studied my veins and wondered how quickly they would drain.
The dark, and what it may eventually do, frightened me.
Eight months into my relocation, knowing that the occasional Xanax wasn’t enough to restore me, that sadness was becoming an addiction, I went in search of help. And I found it in the form of an intuitive coach and energy healer. The plan: 45 minutes of talking — similar to traditional therapy — and 45 minutes moving the energy around my body while lying on a massage table.
This was my first expedition into the world of energy healing, or reiki. If you’re unfamiliar with the ancient Japanese practice, reiki is the art of balancing your vibrations by putting hands over or on various energy centres. The ritual is supposed to unblock these centres, your chakras, where you carry your emotions and spirit, and clear your mind and body of dis-ease. Only a few years earlier, I would have mocked myself for believing in such then-perceived malarky. Now, I am an eager disciple of energy.
At our introductory session, Robyn, my healer, said my energy flowed vertically through my body, sticking to my sides, reluctant to stretch out and explore the world. An accurate assessment. After setting an intention — connection, hope, love, gratitude, whatever it was I wanted in my life — she held my feet and head, she pressed her hands to my back and abdomen, invoking the feeling associated with the intention. Her palms left imprints on my body long after she removed them. Sometimes, I swore she had three or four hands.
Together, through words and touch, we uncovered the roots of my insecurities, my anxieties, my fears, and slowly heaved them free. Over the next ten months, I walked, tingling, out of the sessions with more clarity and joy, fewer visits to the shadowy crevices in my mind, and a healthier connection to life around me and to myself. I was open to receive something good, anything good.
And then I sat across from a man in a dive bar.
I used to have these moments all the time, the brief interactions with strangers, or near-strangers, who felt like long-lost friends. I fed off them, got high from them. They were the reason for leaving my apartment. And then, when I became disconnected from myself, these moments began to fade. You can always tell when someone’s energy is off. Mine was spoiling.
I can’t pinpoint exactly what it was about this man that lit me up. Handsome, creative, kind, yes. But there was something else. There was just something about him, too — his frequency. I could suddenly feel it with my own newly-tuned energy.
He was a reminder that those beautiful moments, those undefinable connections, even if only for one night, were still out there waiting for me. It was the torch I needed to reveal all the work I’d been doing on myself. Proof that I was healing. With a touch on the shoulders, conversation, and eye contact, he jump-started me, like an old car with an expired battery.
Over the next few days, desire unchained my soul and creativity gushed from a faucet. My healer felt the energy contort out of my body in great spirals. Being alive was amazing again.
Eight months later, after giving Toronto a fair chance with a brighter state of mind, after pushing the dark deeper into hibernation with anti-depressants, after continuing to work on myself, I moved back to Vancouver. Home.
There was never anything lacking on the West Coast. It was my inner turmoil that distorted my perception.
I am now grateful for all those isolated months. Being alone, really alone, forced me to put on glasses and peer within my soul. There were no distractions. There was unencumbered time to sift through the wreckage inside me. And that’s where I found the connection, belonging, love, and excitement I had been yearning for. Tangled, dirtied, spent. They weren’t lurking in another city, multiple cocktails, or an impassioned make-out as I believed them to be. (Although I do / will still gravitate towards that trifecta, now it’s for the experience, not the escape.)
Isolation broke me, but I needed it to, to shatter and become whole.
That’s the premise behind kintsugi, isn’t it? Another gift from Japanese culture.
When an artifact is broken, it’s pressed back together with luminescent liquid gold; its cracks, its damage, are where the light lives. We honour its imperfections and its vulnerabilities. And it becomes even more beautiful than it once was. A metamorphosis. People are kintsugi too.
A funny thing happened as I finished writing this. I scribbled down the ideas on kintsugi upon returning home from a walk with a friend, feeling inspired and refreshed from conversation, company, and air. A few days later, my friend posted a poem she had composed. Its theme: kintsugi. While roaming the streets of East Vancouver together, did my energy catch hers whispering lines from her poem, did we both hone in on the word as it floated by in the breeze? I’d like to think so.
Credit: Book of Life