How Telepathy Got Us Through the Beginning of the End of the World
A pandemic almost-meet cute and a different take on disenfranchised loss
My crush asks about my bowel movements, and I stick my tongue out at him. A lot. He wants to know my dreams, what I’m having for dinner, what the flow of my last menses was like. And then he sticks needles in me until I fall asleep. This is our usual routine.
It’s not exactly a run-of-the-mill romance because these are not exactly run-of-the-mill times.
And we just eye-fucked for a solid year, so excuse my disappointment over this ending with an anti-climatic whimper.
Not that he didn’t sweetly sit next to my side to watch over me as I slept in my last session. Not that he didn’t let out a whiplashed “NO!” from the depths of his soul when I broke the news I was leaving the city. Not that he didn’t reel backward as though I’d physically hit him.
It was how quickly he accepted it. How easily he said goodbye. How he swept his arms in a grand gesture towards my art on his walls, saying, “Well, you will be here always.”
This is all for the better, though. It is clear I am not yet healthy enough to gravitate to healthy partners. I am, in part, leaving the city to escape a sociopath who has been threatening and harassing me.
My codependent tendencies get me in all kinds of fun debacles. All sorts of hijinks ensue.
So it’s been easy to assume this spark with even my crush is likely tainted by at least some degree of toxicity. I wonder what maladaptive coping strategies he has hiding under the sheen of those tender eyes, sometimes. I can sense he carries tragedies and came to his tenderness the hard way, much like myself. He’s never uttered a word about it, but those eyes. I can feel the story in my body when his gaze meets mine.
So this parting is for the better, surely.
For the better part of a year, I didn’t think it could possibly end with anything other than us picking out his & hers monogrammed hand towels and skipping off into the sunset. We made so many promises with our eyes.
But we also both agreed, with our actual words (on numerous occasions) (about varying subjects), that what is meant for us does not pass us by. We both subscribe to that church of surrender. We are both adept at letting go and sinking into the flow of life, even when the currents pull us away from what we want and think we need most.
(Think being the operative word, of course.)
We saw the entirety of each other’s faces only once or twice in a whole year. The handful of times he saw mine I was always sticking my tongue out at him. (For analysis, of course.) (Usually too pale & puffy.)
And only once did he pull his mask down for me — as he walked me to the door one evening, to beam an encouraging smile at me. “Madelyn,” he paused and called as I started to push open the door to exit. I spun, and he yanked his mask down to light the room with his 1,000-watt smile. It will be okay, his entire face said.
I had been hit with a tsunami of chaos in my life that week and that full-face exposed smile was an offering of solace from him that knocked the wind out of me. Weak-kneed, I almost couldn’t walk out of the clinic afterward.
Such a small gesture could only become such a massive one in the maelstrom of a pandemic.
I first came in dying. Or certain I was. It was that clear-the-browser-history-the-end-is-here Defcon level 1 kind of pain that leaves you scrambling to find any aid possible because of its fatal-feeling immediacy. It had hit me out of the blue one morning so hard I had to call a friend to pick me up in the middle of a morning walk.
My best friend was due to rush me to the ER when the whisps of familiarity began tugging at me, though — this was something I’d felt before, I started realizing. I combed through my journals. I asked the bestie when the last ER trip was and returned to those dates. Sure enough, the last time I was in the ER, I described the same symptoms I found myself in again. Gastritis.
Strangely for me, gastritis doesn’t cause all that much actual stomach pain like it does for most people. Maybe because I’m alien, as several of my doctors tease. Nothing aligns with my body the way it ‘should’ or usually does align with the general population.
Instead, gastritis in my body feels like a diffuse yet sharp fatal-feeling pain throughout my body — the kind that sends every alarm sounding full-blare.
When I felt it this time, it was the 3rd time I’d been through it, and I was done with Western medicine’s band-aid approach of mitigating symptoms while worsening the root issue. I did some digging and found not one but multiple solid studies showing and replicating consistent results of acupuncture having significantly higher success rates for resolving gastritis over the western medicine approach. I was sold.
I bee-lined to the closest community clinic in my stained pajamas and bare, agonized face. It was the first year of the pandemic, after all, a year I lived almost entirely in pajamas and without makeup or the energy to get around to laundry.
So I was bewildered as my new acupuncturist kept asking me questions not related to my health or current pains — what was for dinner? What did I do for a living? Those are cute pajama pants! Where did I get them? The unrelated questions were especially confusing in a community setting with 7 other people in the same quiet, dim room taking needle naps. I’d been to community acupuncture before for different things, and in those clinics it was always a hard-set rule to keep the speaking to whisper level and as minimal as possible so as not to disturb the other patients as they attempted to chill their nervous systems out.
But here, my new acupuncturist was eagerly keeping me engaged in conversation. My head was clouded with pain, but I quickly wondered, “Is he…?” No. Of course not. I’m in stained pajamas and look like I’ve been hit by a bus. No. Unpossible.
A single treatment made a profound difference in pain levels, bringing them down to manageable levels. So I was back in no time flat, ready for another needle nap.
This time he made it clear.
When he woke me from my needle nap, he hovered over me, staring tenderly for a few exaggerated beats, and then finally said, “You have such a beautiful smile.”
I reflexively thanked him and then realized — Wait, I have a mask on. He could only see my eyes. But I realized he meant my eyes. We both smile with our eyes, our entire bodies. Though he had a mask on, too, I realized I could see he had a beautiful smile as well from the way his eyes lit up.
The next time I came in, I fell into such a deep sleep I was plagued with hypnic jerks and light snoring, a testament to both my levels of pain and the power of the needles. He was concerned enough to nudge me awake halfway through to ensure everything was alright.
When he woke me up at the end again, it took a few split seconds to reorient myself and land back into the room. As soon as I did, there was a little spark as our eyes met. There was a tender, pointed stillness in him as he said, “Acupuncture looks good on you.”
Which I took at face value — to mean he could tell how much better I felt after all that hot hypnic jerking, drooling over myself, and snoring. I said, “Yeah, I really respond strongly to it, apparently…” He nodded vigorously and said, “Yes, you definitely do.”
That was when I finally realized Oh.
So my appointments became lingering, the last of the day. We had laughing attacks over stupid things, sometimes so hysterical he had to leave the room so as not to wake any of the other patients. We shifted from small talk to heavy subjects with adroitness and ease. It was always hard to leave. Goodbyes were full of gushing gratitude and profuse reminders of how good it was to see one another. He confessed more than once my appointments were what he looked forward to all week.
So you can see why I was monogramming hand towels in my mind for an entire year, yeah?
But now, I feel the currents of the universe calling me to the safety of home for far more than a safe harbor. I need rest in a complete way that I can only get there. I came into the clinic initially for relief from the emergency of gastritis, but kept returning to keep the momentum up in resolving my life-long overstimulated nervous system; Half of the work we were doing with the needles was to quell the overstimulation of working for a Big Company in a Big City.
And I knew the needles could only do so much. A breather from work in a Small Town was necessary to completely heal.
I might have only seen his whole face once, but it was as pleasing as his energy; neither to be forgotten.
And I think just to know someone like him exists in this world may be enough for now. Leaving the city partly due to a stalker has left me mostly angry at me for fooling myself into thinking I was mostly recovered from my patterns of emotionally manipulative men. As the course of this crush unfolded, it reminded me that there are still needles in the haystack.
And maybe that’s a bit of living in Fantasy Land, just filling in the blanks the way I want to, the way we humans are wont to do. Maybe he’s yet another emotional manipulator presenting a convincing mask, and I didn’t hang around long enough to see the slip of it.
My self-trust is still far from solid terra firma, but to buy fully into that conspiracy theory would be doubting my intuition. Really, I know. I know he was a gentle soul. Just like I knew the sociopath was a sociopath from minute one. (Hence another layer of the anger with myself.)
If I have learned anything in this life, it is the undeniable value of the piercing intuition I am blessed/cursed with. It’s why a Big City is too much energy for me; Why I can feel my acupuncturist’s life story in my body when his eyes meet mine. I am a living sponge who is at saturation and just needs a bit of wringing out.
For such a small flirtation, it feels silly to feel such grief over its ending.
This is in part thanks to disenfranchised loss, partly due to it being a seemingly small thing that helped me through the beginning of the end of the world as we knew it. It was not actually small at all. When the world was in lockdown, and my “pod” was limited to seeing just 6 immediate family members and my best friend on infrequent occasions, he was the only soul in the world I interacted with regularly. Three times a week. Often laughing so hard we’d have to part to different rooms to not wake the sleeping patients around us.
To say the very least, to have that yanked away felt like a tease.
But instead of cleaving to the what-ifs, I let myself acknowledge the pain for a few beats. Then I surrender to the flow, our church. I know what I want, but the universe knows what I need. My heart calms in the trust of that.
I remind myself that we’re all just walking each other home and that everything in this life is constantly moving, breathing, reorienting, changing — nothing is fixed in place, nothing permanent.
Back in the first days of email, I remember receiving a chain letter that said everyone we meet comes into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. The energy flowing between him and me made me hope he was coming into my life for a lifetime, and in the tantrum of our parting, I cursed the universe for having other seasonal plans. But as the dust settles, I remember some people fall into two categories at once: they help us along our paths for a very short part of it — for a season — but leave a mark for a lifetime.
How could having such a thrill sprinkled throughout such a rough year not leave my heart permanently rendered, more mended?
How could having so many wordless conversations not re-animate me?
How is that not worth a lifetime?
My favorite book has always been The Little Prince due to its wisdom on attachment and loss for precisely these lessons. There’s a lot in it to relate to this situation, but one line, in particular, has always given me goosebumps, and I’ve never known precisely why:
“Words are the source of misunderstandings.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Every time I would encounter that particular line in reading The Little Prince, it would stop me cold. There was something poignant about it I couldn’t yet put my finger on. Having always been a big bookworm and a wanna-be writer myself, I wanted to argue with it, but something else in me was acknowledging a larger truth.
I know beyond a shadow words are the source of misunderstandings now. Because through this seasonal little situationship that will linger with me for a lifetime, we primarily communicated in lingering gazes. And yet we understood each other perfectly.
How is that not a satisfactory ending?
I am skipping into the sunset. Maybe not with him at my side, but always in my memories; the world a little brighter. I save the sweeping grand gestures for another day and just place my hands over my heart, whispering, “Well, you will be here always.”
