“It’s time we did a counterpart reading,” my astrologer Jade said to me, frankly, like a doctor reviewing a clipboard. 

“Yeah?” I asked, masking my enthusiasm to know EVERYTHING. 

My heart was admittedly still tender, having gone through one of the greatest losses of my life two years prior. 

My soulmate, Rob, had passed away from cancer just three short months after his diagnosis. He transitioned from a body I could touch and hold, laugh with and talk to, to a foul-mouthed spirit guide just six months after we’d broken up.

We spoke every day. Every day until his last. The day he died, my heart turned into what felt like freshly wet bubble gum – unstable and unable to stick to anything.

My two years of casual (highly irresponsible) dating felt like a window shade slowly closing. I’d had plenty of fun romps with plenty of hot men. One that would drive halfway across Los Angeles in his yellow convertible to meet me at a carwash to say hi, pick me up, and spin me around in the air like a princess. One that would offer to watch the 4th of July fireworks with me on his roof where we’d get the best view. One that would walk into my birthday pool party, dressed in a muscle tee with a unicorn printed on it, carrying a large gift with a bow on top. 

Most of these flings had ended in miniature dumpster fires – ‘cause that’s what happens when one party (hi, it’s me) is unable to really attach, and also unwilling to communicate how she really felt, and also also throwing darts of blame to deflect from the truth of how fucked up I felt – 

It did get better over time. I got better over time.

But apparently, now it was time for a man to enter my life, and stay. 

And I felt it.

This is not to say that I didn’t wish for that kind of love the whole time I was writhing in the wake of life-shattering trauma. I was, BELIEVE ME I WAS.

I fantasized about it all the time, which was a wonderful way to dissociate from the pain of accepting that healing takes time, and that I was in the middle of a process that couldn’t be rushed. But the truth that lived in the darkest corners in me, the space underneath the part of me that wanted so desperately to reach towards the future I couldn’t yet touch – was that Rob was dead, and I’d never be the same again.

But here, here was hope. A counterpart reading! A future! Not from my own addiction to a near-constant stream of fantasy, but because it was written in the fucking stars!

“Yes,” he said, then adding “I don’t give these readings to everyone.”

“Not everyone will meet their counterpart in this lifetime. But these cycles are opening for you, and it’s time.”

Now, you can pause to have your opinion here about whatever you believe when it comes to astrology, spirituality, and the power of the unseen. I’m NO astrologer. But I’ve been talking to dead people since before I could actually talk, and I’ve learned to stop living in denial of the mysteries of life that the strictly scientifically evidence-bound overculture would prefer we ignored.

So it also comes as no surprise to me (now) that my work lives right on the edge of this veil – that line between living and dead, idea and actualization, confrontation and acceptance, death and rebirth. I’m not a researcher, I’m a woman with a gift of seeing and hearing the energetic central pulse of a thing, clarifying it into more potent life, and nurturing it into a fuller expression of its true season.

This was always my destiny, whether I resisted it, or not.

Luckily, I no longer resist it, and the depth of my knowing isn’t something I waste time questioning anymore. When I’m connected to it, it is practically limitless. So when I asked that part of me — that DEEPLY knowing part of me — whether I wanted to have a counterpart reading, and know all that Jade had to share with me, it was a no-brainer yes, because I already knew.

“Okay,” I said to him, ready for the adventure.

Part 2 coming soon…