Letter 22

February 19, 2017

Dear Jesse,

Within 2 months from my experience with the vulture my marriage had not only changed forever but we were packing up to relocate to Charleston, SC, from New Orleans. Not only was change happening at a rapid rate but I was now relocating to be just an hour away from him, the person who had entered my life and was waking up parts of myself that I couldn't ignore. I remember the road trip there to South Carolina like it was yesterday. There was a sense inside of walking into the complete unknown but also a feeling of knowing. I knew I was somehow being guided as crazy as it may have sounded to myself at that time.

I wasn't more then fifteen minutes into the trip when my eye caught a bird launching out of a tree into the sky from the side of the highway. I watched as it flew across the highway lanes when suddenly it swooped down and with ease gliding directly over my car.

It was a vulture.

From that moment on 10 minutes didn't pass by without me noticing vultures either circling above the highway or flying high across in the sky. Their presence was with me the entire time over the two day road trip.

I didn't understand any of it... yet something deep inside of me did.

It was no coincidence that where we were moving to was full of vulture habitat. Their presence was around me constantly. Their open wings while perched on tree tops started to become a visual representation of what was happening to me. When I could I'd escape off to the beach alone to connect deeper and deeper within myself. It was there in the open space that I felt that I could safely become vulnerable. I remember one evening having this deep desire to stretch my arms wide open. I wanted to physically emulate the very thing the vulture seemed to be showing me time and time again. I propped my phone up, walked out onto the sand and stood with my arms wide open facing the vast ocean.

Little by little I was opening up in more ways then I had ever imagined. At the same time my heart was being intensely drawn to the person whose presence was connecting to parts of myself that had been forgotten. But it wasn't until the moment I received a text message from him one morning that my heart cracked open... wide open.

When I opened the message there was a picture of him but my eyes couldn't escape what was hanging on the wall just behind him...

An open winged vulture.

It was a picture he had taken. Within an instant such deep emotions surged through my body as I was absolutely speechless. This was the moment I couldn't fight it anymore and I sank deep into the feelings inside myself. It wasn't until I verbalized my truth to him that things became deeper. He was the only person during this time that I could talk about what was happening with me and with you, Jesse. There was this sense of such comfort that existed between he and I that I never could quite understand and it brought tears to my eyes so many times. Nothing about it made sense from the outside looking in but what was existing between us had nothing to do with what met the eye. I remember the phone conversation we had concerning our connection.

I couldn't not address what was going on inside of me.

I told him that I had to pull away from connecting while I continued to dismantle my marriage. The deep emotional and physical pull towards him was incredibly overwhelming. It was like feeling an extreme magnetic pull towards another person. To hear him tell me the same feelings were inside of him made the absence of our connection for a few months even harder, but our connection was making the tension in my home unbearable.

I felt like a tower crumbling.

Like having a fire bolt strike and the structure I had once stood as for years was collapsing.

Piece by piece.

Everything I once thought, life as I had known it, was being torn away yet there was something inside of me that was going to see myself through it. This very feeling is what kept me standing in the midst of all the rubble, the intense grief and my aloneness.

The unknown was becoming the very thing I craved although it meant change, radical change.

But it was the only way to a freedom I had never known and I couldn't look back.

The year before you took your life we had had a conversation I've never forgotten. You had been drinking heavily. I could tell by the slur of your words on the other end of the line.

"I don't know, there's something different about you",  you'd muttered to me in an almost curious way as we both talked in-depth about our childhood experience together.

That moment has never left my memory.

In some of my darkest and scariest moments of giving into the change that was happening along this journey I've held onto that moment between us. Not because I thought I was different from you, but because I was going to step out into the unknown and believe that my life could be different from everything I had ever believed or known.