The Girl I Always Wanted to Be
I always wanted to be a girl like that, not Hollywood pretty but so blindingly beautiful a spirit you can’t quite recall what she looks like on the outside. You only remember her radiance.
As my friend and I sit in the Kirtan chanting with electric guitars and channeling George Harrison in an Asheville Ashram, the girl I always wanted to be sits between the two guitarists, holding a mic and smiling, eyes twinkling (literally, I swear!), leading us as we sing the sanskrit words. I think of the women I’ve encountered like her. Not many, very few in fact. And I always wanted to say, how can I be you? Vibrating with energy and yet calm as Buddha. Flowers blooming in your wake.
I’ve seen my share of imposters, women who, like me, want to be a girl like that, but they never get it quite right.
This girl is comfortable in her skin. She’s been places — Morocco, Thailand, or Tibet. She can teach you asanas you never heard of. She smiles like that’s the only form her mouth knows, but she also sings like you imagine angels sing.
She’s not trendy, no tatts in sight. She’s kind. Always. Doesn’t take things personally. She wears an aura of invincibility. Insults and catcalls bounce off her like she’s wearing Wonder Woman’s bracelets, but she doesn’t dress like Wonder Woman. She wears loose cotton. Not in a weird Amish kind of way. Just to be comfortable because she’s not trying to impress anyone. A woman so generous and full of joy would have to be a terrific lover. She doesn’t have to advertise it.
She is the anti-me. She’s NEVER shot heroin or fallen in love with a narcissist or been to jail unless it’s for something noble like saving a redwood.
The kirtan ends. I’d like to talk to her, to satisfy some curiosity. Who are you? Where are you from? What is your story? But I don’t. I’m a stranger here, a visitor from another place, and who has time for all that anyway? So I leave with my friend, and on the way out, I tell her, “You know that girl, the one who sang, I always wanted to be a girl like that.”
Of course, she’s not a girl. She’s probably in her thirties and I’m twice her age so there’s no chance of me becoming that girl. I have learned to live as the spectacularly flawed being I am — one who holds onto grievances as if they are her most prized possessions, one who uses her will like a blunt instrument, one who wishes and wants and desires but has no idea what for.
And so… it’s just another encounter. I’ve projected all my fantasies of the goddess I wish I’d been onto a stranger, who surely has insecurities and flaws of her own.
The next day my friend and I scour the shops of downtown Asheville, searching for a gift. We travel from store to store, admiring the Buddha statues, the Ganeshas carved from volcano rock, the wind chimes, and the soft organic cotton clothes. I buy some Kratom, explaining it makes me less bitchy when I go to parties and don’t want to drink. She gets CBD for her dog who’s getting old.
Then we’re back in the shops, trying on hats and scarves and snaking our way along crowded streets, finally finding ourselves in a place that sells crytals and spiritual books. Not a cluttered place, so last century, but clean and spacious and well lighted. I love the rocks, but I’m not buying a 60 dollar crystal no matter how much prosperity or creativity it promises. So we wander back out only to see a sign: Tarot readings.
“That sounds like fun,” I say, thinking of my last Tarot reading. Here. In Asheville. Ten years ago with my teenaged stepson, where nothing of consequence was said. Yet it seems the thing to do once a decade. My friend says, let’s go back inside. So we do and sure enough, the tarot reader is just finishing up and there’s no one scheduled for the next slot. I put down my name and we’re standing in the middle of the store when the curtain to the room at the back parts and the tarot reader looks out to see who’s next.
“Holy shit,” I say. “It’s her.”
“Holy shit,” my friend says. “It’s her. It’s a sign.” We decide we’ll get readings together.
The tarot reader smiles in delight when we tell her we were in the kirtan the night before. She pulls out the cards — yoga tantra cards — and explains they’re only mirrors, that everything is a reflection. Not forecasts, just possibilities. Our own subconscious will know how to interpret the images on the cards.
What is your question, she asks. I decide to seek guidance about a new creative venture. So she places the cards down, one in the middle, one on either side, one below and one above. The cards seem to say I should get out of my head and get out of my own way. Innocuous enough, but that isn’t what this is really about. The future will do what the future does. Even I know that. At least my foundation card was awareness. My friend’s cards confirm her suspicions that her nearly perfect life is subject to change.
I barely listen to the explanation of the cards. I want to know her story and graciously she tells it: born the daughter of a preacher in a trailer in Kentucky, raised outside a city in Ohio, she went to college in Kentucky where she was allowed to create her own curriculum and traveled to Thailand where she discovered that Jesus Christ could have many forms and many names and that nothing was as she had been raised to believe.
“So I majored in Asian philosophy,” she says. And now she travels to India to study with a guru, teaches yoga sometimes and gives readings for seekers with a deck of yoga tantra cards in Asheville, and chants words of wisdom and prayer. Her story is even better than I imagined.
“You’re the girl I always wanted to be,” I tell her.
Her turquoise eyes twinkle as she says, “And you’re the elder woman of passions and interests and insight, I hope to be some day.”
