Three and a half years ago my life fell apart – so that it could come together.  Three months after the big event, I believed I wouldn’t survive it. That I was unlovable and emotionally hideous.

It was then that LionHeart took me into his arms.

We had never met before, and our circle of friends just casually overlapped. I was in a place of electric grief, my body and spirit feeling mangled and untouchable. I am surprised sometimes that I didn’t shock people with the level of my crumbling and I suspect that my dearest friends felt a terror and sadness for me.  But I was oblivious to their empathy because I was so lost, bleeding internally of a wound that had no immediate cure.

I saw him watching me for the first day, his blue eyes taking me in. But my pain was wild and I had nothing to offer but fear and a sense of being maimed.  He moved cautiously and with such gentleness when I felt like such a storm tossed wreckage, and he touched me carefully on the hand and my storm eased ever so much.

It was the second day that I wanted him, more than animal need. More than desert water to a dying man – I wanted him, because he was quiet strength and supple energy when I was a hurricane of loss in need of grounding.

We went for a walk in the late night, and talked of why I was bleeding from the inside – spilling guts and losing 8 years of life. He moved closer, I suspect now that like any man seeing a woman in such pain he wanted to fix me, and at the time I would never have occurred to me to ask for it – but I truly needed someone to reach for me.  It was the one, honest to god time I can think of – when I really needed the rescue.

He reached.

And as it happened his life was also falling apart around him. He revealed his own layers of loss and my buried instinct came to the surface to reach back and hold him as well.

We were nearing an elementary school park and my leg began to cramp.  I was wearing knee-high docs and a mini-skirt when I got the worst or best timed Charlie-horse ever.

My leg cramped and he hurried to unlace my boot taking my leg in his hand and massaging the bound muscle until I could breathe again.

What timing.

The silence stretched and the awareness of my foot in his hands brought the fire up my body that I believed had been snuffed. It was a back draft of oxygen into a void. My breathing changed from the flames in my lungs and I couldn’t seem to feel anything but the searing heat of his hands.

“Is that better?” he asked.

I could only nod and whisper, “Yes, thanks.”

And then we were two cyclones coming together. He lifted me up and carried me to the steps of the school. We didn’t speak. Too powerful. Too much to say without words.  My body bent to every command his hands issued.  He cupped my sex, my breasts, my pain with such need of his own and attention to my wants.

We had one another on the steps of the elementary school, in the kind of passion that I had only read about or fantasized.

On the grass, on the railing, into each other like only the deeply wounded and yearning to be touched can accomplish. His mouth on me. My lips around him.  His electricity deep inside my womb, penetrating to the center of where I thought I’d lost myself – and in doing… I was rescued.  My soul came back to my body as though from a long journey, and I sighed with such relief.  I was going to be okay. 

We held each other on the grass and confessed that neither of us were in a place where we could be more than that night. We could not be together.  We each had healing and growing to do.  We had to go become the people we were meant to be.

When we got back to the group, it was early the next morning and I had a satisfied glow and twigs in my hair and concrete burns on my ass.  No one said anything, and the next day I worked and he flew back home.

I have compared men to him for 3 years. Unfairly, true, but I have also had a deep well of gratitude for him.  We both needed each other. We were both aching and in need of contact. Just contact. After he left I wrote once and he wrote back and that was the last I heard from him – three years ago. The man to touch me in my absolute vulnerability, my most painful of times and the most unprotected state of mind and emotion I have ever been in.  He has seen me and held me at my worst and I feel a powerful sense of grace toward that.

On Saturday morning, he walked up to me at Cannon Beach. My stomach fell away the earth shifted.