05.11.07

Nicolas

Posted in Emotions, Synchronicities, Letters to Nicolas at 3:55 pm by Athena

Nicolas.

My Beautiful One. 

I first started emailing Nicolas online in the early winter of 2005.  I’d put an ad up on a dating site and although I didn’t fit his description of wants or he mine – I liked a line on his site that said something to the effect that no one appreciates the written conversation anymore – or something like that.

Anyway, I dropped him a line, not expecting to hear back, but praising his love for the written word and the lost art of correspondence.  Then he wrote me back, and he had a beautiful voice.  There weren’t pics on his page and it really didn’t matter I could see him through the words he chose, the metaphors he wielded and the enthusiasm that came through each time I opened my email.

I began going to work early so I could check my mail, working through lunch to be near my computer, and staying late so I could send one last letter to him before going home. He was charming, and creative and used words like they were his air or water, familiar and comfortable.  As our conversations progressed I found myself looking at my world differently, so I could better describe it to him.  I found that although I was still grieving from a broken heart, and the chaos of my divorce – his solid observations of the world, and love and spirituality made me feel as though I’d reached into the Universe in desperate need – aching, feeling the death of my old self – I the Universe had answered me with Nicolas.  He caught me, coaxed my eyes open and kept me waking up each morning with a sense of possibility – what would he write today, how would I respond? 

I found myself stopping to touch things, a park bench or a stone or a patch of grass so that I could tell him how amazing it was or how I felt to make contact with something in my new world.

I discovered that I admired the sunrise more each morning, listened to the birds near my window in the evening and inhaled more deeply of the scent of coffee as I passed a shop.  I laughed more spontaneously, and cried less out of fear.  I took more walks and wrote more poetry and still couldn’t wait to check my mail the next morning.

Through my communication with him there opened in me a wellspring of childlike optimism and curiosity, it was always there I think, but perhaps sleeping – waiting to be nudged awake.

It could have been the timing of my divorce and the realization that I was finally free to be myself, but I firmly believe that I would not have bloomed so happily without the voice of my Beautiful One and the desire he created within be to better and more magical and full of a greater sense of love.  So I bloomed.  And somewhere in that time, as winter rolled into Portland I realized – a part of me had fallen in love with Nicolas.

So I told him I couldn’t meet him.  I told him that I worried my expectations would corrupt the beauty of the synchronistic find we had and the amazement of how crystal and yet frail the connection was. He agreed.  And we decided that if the Universe wanted us to meet – the Universe would arrange it for us and that would make it all the more exciting.  So we agreed – we would not try to meet.

He was the last thought in my mind as I drifted off to sleep and the first in my awareness in the morning – and I didn’t even know what he looked like.  I didn’t even know what his voice really sounded like or how tall he was – and yet – none of that mattered.

One day, I sent him my phone number and told him to call if it ever felt right… then I went on the BlissQuest and lost his email, lost his contact information and lost the sound of his voice.

I told myself it was time to let go.  Let go of Portland, let go of a safe job and a nest of comfortable things to venture forth into the world – to pursue the dreams.

The part of me Nicolas helped to awaken, the sleeping giant of joyful expression needed the elixir of the unknown.  I needed to re –view the world as I thought I knew it, rename, relearn, re-label, rediscover and all with newly baptized senses.

Again, I know this was all a part of me before, but it suddenly became evident after a month on the road that I was having trouble processing my experience, the beauty the vastness and the overwhelming amount of information without the language I used to describe the world to Nicolas each morning.

The language I spoke to him in my emails was heightened. It was dramatic and laden with metaphor, steeped in the dialogue of myths and stories.  I felt at  the beginning of the BlissQuest that I couldn’t wrap my tongue around the enormity of what I was doing, I couldn’t articulate the re-evolution of my inner journey without that language. 

I had no fantasies that I would ever find Nicolas again.  I never harbored any ideas of meeting him in person.  I only knew that the man I’d fallen a little in love with, held a key to my becoming in that I could say to him – in the language I knew, I could tell the story of learning what it means to live.  The story of smelling chocolate.  The story of listening to the laughter of children playing in the fountain along the waterfront.  The story of a grass between my bare toes, or the taste of a great Americano.

I never thought I’d see words put together the way he could again.  I’m not even sure I really wanted to, because something about the brevity, the sheer passion of the time we talked and shared ideas and I swear to god, I could almost feel him brush a stray hair from my forehead when I knew – logically knew I was only reading an email – I’m not sure I wanted that idea or feeling or memory to be replaced with the real thing.

A living breathing man.  A person.  He was real and I’m not sure I wanted that confirmed in my mind.

So I wrote letters to him on my BlissQuest.  Mostly when I felt too verbally or emotionally congested and needed to feel like he would be reading – so I could explain to him in detail what I saw, felt or wanted.  I wrote to him when I was lonely, or hurting, amazed or tired.  Never once thinking he would actually read those letters.

Last week I stumbled in my own mind.  A hiccup of strength and I faltered – for a moment, believing I couldn’t do it, live my dream.  I sat at Vivace and cried at my laptop, in the corner, unnoticed.  I wondered what stupidity had brought me to think I was as lucky as I thought, as grandiose as I thought or as creative as I thought.  I wondered for a moment if I wasn’t just crazy.  So in the corner there, I wrote a letter to Nicolas, asking for the first time with great need. 

Just Tonight.

Then I opened Craigslist and left a short note in the missed connection section with three clues – and a wish.

The first reply I received I didn’t recognize the email, nor did I recognize the way he wrote.  I responded with a thank you, but said that My Nicolas knew my name.  The next morning he wrote back, in the language I recognized, the rhythm I’d missed so deeply and apologized for forgetting my name as well as listing a couple of things only I would have known from our letters.

It didn’t even matter that he didn’t remember my name.  It didn’t even matter that the energy was different.  He’s alive.  He’s real and he’s here in Portland. That knowledge alone – gave me a sense of completion.

I sent him a link to the letters and a note about how excited I was to find him – then I went to my room and sobbed – Sobbed.  I didn’t tear up or get watery, I fucking wailed and snotted and cried so hard I actually gagged myself.  But get this, I was crying because I was so happy.  I have never cried that hard out of pure joy.  Catharsis.  Completion.

I cried that hard when my heart was broken.  I cried that hard when I thought I was going to die.  But I’ve never cried that hard out of Bliss. Beauty. Joy. My eyes were swollen all the next day and well into the next afternoon and yet – I felt great.

He claimed it was amazing that he found the ad on craigslist, buried there in the missed connections.  He said he doesn’t use craigslist, but that he wanted to try posting information for a gig and checked the missed connections just by chance and the first thing he noticed was his name.

After our first two new emails, very short and full of questions and answers to prove to one another that we are legitimate – I can’t help but feel like perhaps he was not meant to be found yet.  We are two different people.  We both went on to amazing adventures and while I am a huge believer in fate and synchronicity – it is possible this weirds him out. 

I wont speak for him, because I just don’t know. 

But the energy, the connection doesn’t feel right. 

I sobbed because I felt like I’d been given an answer to so many things at once.  Magic, Intention, Need and Coincidence.  I let Nicolas hold my voice for me, coaxing encouraging and blossoming.  I went questing and over time learned to use my voice for myself and for people who read my work.  I felt like as I sobbed and shook that I’d come full circle in a way.  A closure.  A gift of peace.

I don’t know what will happen to Nicolas.  I don’t know if we will ever meet.

Do Griffin and Sabine ever meet?

How would the dynamic shift? Was he in my life for that time for this purpose or is there more to it? Was I in his life for that time for any specific purpose?

Clearly I didn’t impact him the same way.  But I hope I gave something back.

I still sort of hope the Universe sees fit to sit us next to one another at the bar somewhere and just by accident we learn each others names.  I still wonder when a man catches my attention who is about his age and has the same kind of energy that I think of as Nicolas, I still wonder if it might be him.

Is he the guy who walks in front of me on the cross walk while I wait at a red light.  Is he the guy next to me at the bookstore? Is he the stranger in the supermarket who causally asks if I know which isle has the jelly?

Will that be the only time I hear his voice? Will I only know his touch is he’s the kindly stranger who helps me with a heavy box then disappears back up the street before I learn who he is?

Posting for him on Craiglist in this way was almost too perfect.  It is after all, the ultimate missed connection.  A great and powerful and magical connection – short lived  - almost spookily reintroduced to perhaps disappear into the ether again without any proof of its existence other than a few emails. 

He hasn’t written back.  Perhaps his life is too hectic now or he is overwhelmed or freaked out.  I wish only, truly from the very center of all that I am – I wish only for his happiness.  His prosperity and joy are my desire for him.

As for me, there are many pictures of me on the web now, it would be easy to know what I look like, but I have absolutely no clue what he looks like.  None. So for me, I’m not sure if I want to know.  If I end up sitting next to him on the MAX or being seated beside him at the theatre – it’s possible he would know me – but I can’t honestly say whether I would want him to tell me who he was.  Chat, for sure.  Random conversation, a connection, a brush with humanity of a kindred sort – but it might be more kind, perhaps more compassionate to leave me wondering… was that my Nicolas?

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