If you haven’t read parts 1-5 of this story, I highly recommend going in chronological order.
Picking up where we left off last week; we’re at Burning Man and I just had my first ego death and realized I was in love with my best friend.
I think that’s all the context you need for now…
My ego let go and it became the best burn ever.
We played with our friends & wandered through dunes of light and art. We laughed until our ribs hurt and danced until we were caked in a layer of dust.
For the first time all year, I wasn’t bracing. I was present, soft, and ALIVE.
My channel had blown wide open.
I’ve always carried the mediumship gift—my abuela passed it down to me, a gift from a line of women who could hear between worlds. I’d spoken with the dead before, received flashes, whispers, dreams that turned out true.
But for years, the chaos of life had quieted it. Until now.
After the ego death, everything came back online. The veil lifted. My body, my heart, my mind—they were all antennas again.
Everything felt clear.
Two days later, Huub and I rode out to the Temple to honor my abuela. We didn’t say much on the way, but we both knew what had to be done. I honored her with a ritual and left some belongings behind to aid her in her transition to the spirit world.
(pictured above: the 2025 temple)
Afterward, Huub and I slipped away into the dust to see the art and take photos.
We were deeply in love. It was settling. I was surrendered. There was nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be. For once, I could see exactly what was in front of me.
That night was going to be the pinnacle of the whole that is burning man – the night the man burns.
There’s a lot of darkness on man-burn night – I think about it like heaven and hell converging at once on earth, so you have to be very careful with the energy you expose yourself to.
The energy was so overwhelming for me the year before - all of the art cars gather around the man in a giant circular formation and each car plays its own music, leading to a giant warped arena of sound, where the man stands at the center, waiting to be incinerated. I got so overwhelmed the prior year that I made Sam take me far out of the crowd to one of the art pieces so that I could pray for humanity while we sat and watched the whole thing unfold from far away.
But this year was different. I was with Huub, and I felt safe.
We couldn’t find our friends so eventually we stopped searching.
The air vibrated around us, thick with heat and magic.
The moon hung in half again—just as it had the night Nic and I fell in love.
But for the first time in years, my heart wasn’t somewhere else. I wasn’t caught up in what ifs anymore. I was here, with Huub, in my favorite place on earth.
And the realization kept rising in waves:
For the first time in my life I didn’t feel heartbroken.
As he pedaled, tears started falling from my eyes again.
Years of grief leaving my body all at once.
I was in love—deeply, wildly, quietly in love with my best friend. I didn’t think I’d truly deserve such a love again.
Somehow it had found me, and healed me, and left me awestruck again, and the immensity of this realization was hitting me again and again.
He didn’t interrupt. Didn’t fix. Didn’t analyze. He just stayed steady, like he always did.
We got off our bike to take a break from cycling aimlessly around the man and stood in a dark, empty patch of desert, waiting for the man to burn.
“If you asked me I’d say yes.”I said to him, seemingly out of nowhere.
But in the deepest recesses of my being, I knew that I had never been two feet in like I was with him.
He turned his head all too calmly and asked “Should I propose?”
His blue eyes glistened in the firelight.
“What?” I say flustered, & then, “well that’s your decision.”
“But I don’t have a ring….” he says, mostly to himself.
& then, “Oh wait. I actually do have a ring.”
“What?!” I’m not following.
“What better moment?” he asked.
“Well.. that’s your decision.” I said with a hint of sass, clearly flustered as I shook my head in disbelief.
But when I checked in with my body, it was a full-body fuck yes.
“Oh no, but I don’t have a ring….“ and then interrupting himself “Oh wait. I actually have a ring in my backpack.”
“What?!” I said again, laughing, half in disbelief, not quite wrapping my head around what he was saying. He had a ring??
He has a ring? What does he mean he has a ring?!
He smirks.
“Yeah…right before we left camp, this shell ring fell out of my backpack. A ring I’ve had for four years. I never use the front pocket—it must have been there since last year.”
“Are you serious?”
He nods.
I check in with my body then, and stunningly enough it is a full-body fuck yes.
So I propped my phone against the bike frame to film the special moment, still in disbelief.
He gets down on one knee in the dust, says my full name and then asks the question.
“Will you marry me?”
Time stands still.
Yes. A million times yes.
He slides the shell ring that he *happened* to have on him that night onto my finger.
And I start laughing uncontrollably. “Huub, I was your girlfriend yesterday. For only ONE day.”
He shrugs.
“Pretty on brand for us to do things backwards, no?”
Then we’re kissing & laughing and he’s lifting me off of the ground, holding me through an endless stream of tears and laughter and knowing that we are meant to be together. Suddenly fireworks erupt through the sky.
We turn—and in perfect timing, the Man goes up in flames.
Orange and gold fire tear through the night as the pinnacle moment of burning man takes place, and I stand there sobbing, unable to look away, because the divine timing is impeccable.
Everything I’d ever carried—every heartbreak, every wound, every version of myself that had loved and lost—it burned away right then.
When my house burned down, I had told myself I wouldn’t feel at home again until I was back here. I had pictured this exact moment as some kind of completion ritual.
I just hadn’t known how complete it would feel.
So I cried deep, gut-level tears as Huub held me. But this time. Not from loss, from arrival. Happy go lucky tears. I made it, and magic is real, tears.
Tears that purify the soul.
The next morning, we danced and kissed as the desert turned gold.
We magically stumbled upon our friends and told them we were engaged. One by one, their faces shifted from confusion to shock to laughter to hugs to tears. No one was surprised for long. Most of them just shook their heads and said some version of, “Finally.” or “I knew it.”
And that was the strangest part.
To the outside world, it looked sudden. Wild. Illogical.
But to the people who had watched us orbit each other for months, it felt inevitable.
Later, I saw the weight of it finally reach Huub. He had been steady for me all week — holding, grounding, witnessing. Now it was his turn.
He started to cry. I wrapped my arms around him and felt him shake.
“An old woman came up to me at the Temple,” he said, voice breaking. “She put this stone in my hand and then walked away.”
He opened his palm. CELEBRATE, the stone read.
“She knew…” he whispered.
And I just nodded, knowing what he meant. My abuela had died the morning I left for the desert. My abuela, from whom I had inherited my patterns in love, and my deep connection to spirituality and lineage.
And somehow, standing there in the dust and ash, I knew she had her hand involved in liberating me, liberating us, from the wounds in love.
I cupped his face and shook my head, looking at him all bright-eyed and full of hope.
My human.
The next night, the Temple burned.
Thousands gathered in silence as smoke twisted into the sky.
Names, photographs, prayers, grief — all of it rising and dissolving into darkness.
And just like that, the burn was over.
We struck camp down to dust and drove back toward the default world, engaged after two days of officially being boyfriend and girlfriend.
On paper? Ridiculous, considering my track record and the year I had.
It’s laughable. Hilarious. And I’m right there with you shaking my head at the unpredictable way in which my life unfolds. But also? This is how my life has always worked. Not slow. Not cautious. Divinely timed detonations and cosmic catalysts.
7.5 months of being engaged now. 6 months of living together.
Life has only gotten sweeter.
We spend sundays getting empanadas and coffee at Paisita, his always black, decisive, consistent. Mine distilled with milk, soft, sweet, gentle, like I’ve been feeling.
Then we go home and lay on the couch, and I read him Clarice Lispector and Nabokov, and he tells me he’s more in love with me after I close each book because he too shares that deep appreciation for intellect and expression.
Weekdays, we build and create and then in the moments when we cross paths in the kitchen we shower each other in love and laugh and laugh and laugh and dance and play and makeout and smile like idiots.
That’s the best part. The silliness. The laughter we share.
Mostly laughing at ourselves, like best friends do.
Our silly little jokes.
Me, constantly commenting on his European mannerisms and noises (they’re very entertaining to this Mexican-American girl), him, sarcastically disgusted by my American flavor-maxing tendencies and my love of pineapple pizza (which he thinks is a culinary crime to Italian cuisine).
Both of us, sitting on the couch and randomly competing to see who can do the best villain laugh.
Both of us, dancing in the kitchen and singing the words to our favorite songs.
And somehow, after everything… Love feels easy again.
And it turns out that lightning can strike twice in the same place.
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