Lightning Strike from the Cosmos

Hi lovers! Per your request, I put my entire Saturn Return story into one substack for you to read-in full. Enjoy!

It was May 24th. I remember the date because how could I forget? It was the day my Saturn return paused – for those of you who aren’t familiar with astrology, it’s the planet of Karma’s reckoning, known for the way it shakes you out of your old life and aligns you with your path. It was like the cosmos had loosened their grip on my throat. An intermission, so to speak.

I was on my way to an overnight party in Topanga, riding shotgun in my best guy friend Huub’s car. The invitation read something like “wear your finest clothes” which translates to: this is going to be a lavish and luxurious night.

It had been one of the hardest periods of my life. To name a few things; my house burned down in January, weeks after moving in with my whirlwind rebound relationship (that should have only ever been a rebound). And I’d already moved 5 times in six months.

And then, cheers. Champagne flutes clinking over the most decadent charcuterie spread you’ve ever seen, while pretty little bags with capsules within are passed around.

“It’s a heart-opener. They call it the truth serum.” someone says.

And while I don’t frequently say yes to medicine, I say, fuck it. I know these people well. They’re intentional and high vibe, and I trust myself in and out of medicine space in safe environments.

I had been gracefully navigating the chaos for months. Showing up. Holding it together. Doing the inner work. Facing my broken heart.

I wanted, for a change, to not be braced for impact. I wanted to dance and to play.

So I swallowed it down. On the rare occasions that I partake substances, I go into medicine space. And for the first time in months, I felt my body fully relax. Like enough light had been restored inside me that I could safely unwind.

The main event space was absurd. Hollywood’s finest tarot reader was tucked into a corner. There was a grazing table that could feed a village in Versailles. A life-sized taxidermied giraffe head was mounted above the fireplace– real, I was told.

Avant-garde, and uber wealthy.

At one point I found myself sitting next to a friend named Miles. He was drawing an ocean in blue marker on a napkin. Slow methodical waves, moving with the precision that only a true artist could capture. I watched him sketch the horizon line, mesmerized by his intensity.

Out of nowhere, he asked, “How did you go from such a nice guy like Nic to someone like Sam?”

It startled me. Everyone knew my most recent ex, but I had never spoken about Nic to this circle of people. That heartbreak of my one great love was sealed away behind my ribs, gnawing at me with regret and confusion if I paid it too much attention.

“How do you know about Nic?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Podcast. Years ago. You talked about him like he was the love of your life. You had a crazy love story, didn’t you?”

And just like that, I felt the truth serum settle in.

I told him everything.

I couldn’t stop the words from spilling out. The messy demise of us. My throat burned with tears, but I couldn’t stop. I just blurted it out with tears in my throat, while he channeled my emotion into the waves of the ocean he was drawing

“Would you ever go back?”

The question sliced clean through me.

The tears didn’t fall — they pressed, heavy, behind my eyes.

Yes.

If he could show up differently. If he could just change a few things…

Yes.

Because how could I ever experience anything more beautiful than what we had?

Suddenly I remembered the date.

May 24th.

How could I forget?

It would have been our six year anniversary.

I excused myself, from Miles, mildly embarrassed at how much I had shared, and went to find Huub.

If I’m being honest, I’d felt drawn to Huub all evening. Not in a romantic way. Just a quiet pull.

He was my best friend. The safest man in my life. The one who, when everything with Sam imploded, pressed a set of keys into my hand and told me I could use his guest room whenever I needed.

I found him and leaned my head against his shoulder. He adjusted, instinctively, placing his arm behind my back so that I fit there better.

And then the truth serum started talking.

I needed to tell someone the whole story. The messy truth was begging to be spoken.

The thing about Nic is he’s my twin flame.

I know how that sounds. I know it’s a phrase that’s been dragged through Instagram and stripped of meaning.

We were born on each other’s parents’ birthdays. We’re both half-Mexican. We even look alike– enough that strangers have wondered if we’re related.

I had never loved like that.

I had never experienced the level of magic that Nic and I had.

I don’t think many people do.

The weekend we fell in love, we were at a festival called Elements— my first festival ever. We’d eaten too many mushrooms and were sitting cross-legged in our messy tent when he slipped into a full blown ego death.

He could barely remember his own name. At one point, trying to pull a shirt over his head, he looked at me and asked, genuinely,

“Who am I?”

I told him to lie down.

He closed his eyes and I prayed over him. And in that altered space, he saw his entire life with me. Every child. Every loss. Every version of us.

And I stayed with him while the version of himself he had been dissolved.

When he came to, he wasn’t the same.

He went from being the highly desired, rebellious, leather-jacketed boy who couldn’t admit he loved me to whispering,

‘You’re the last woman I’ll ever love.’

Naturally, I didn’t trust it.

So I asked the universe to speak to me in my native tongue — magic.

The next night, it did.

We were dancing at the edge of the crowd when it happened. Bodies pressed together, dancing freely, the kind of festival chaos where you cease to think.

All of our friends were there. The air felt charged. But then again, it always does when you’re young and in love and high on something.

Suddenly, he grabbed my hand forcefully. Urgently.

He pulled me through the crowd, weaving us between strangers until we were in the center. He stopped, spun me toward him, and said almost conspiratorially,

“Watch this.”

He tapped his temples with two fingers with this crazy look in his eyes.

And the very second he did — I kid you not — lightning RIPPED across the sky.

Not a flicker.

No.

The whole sky lit up white and hot, splitting the darkness open.

Really imagine that for a second.

Have you ever seen someone summon lightning on command?

Because it’s pretty fucking crazy.

“How did you know?” I gasped.

But the shocked, almost fearful look on his face told me he didn’t.

He had no idea what he’d done.

And that’s when I knew. It was the pulse of divinity that I’ve always felt beneath the surface of things that had led him to conjure lightning. It was the Divine’s way of proving to me that everything I’d suspected about magic & the spirit realm was real.

So I looked at him defiantly, like I really understood the universe now, and said,

“There’s no such thing as a random universe, Nic.”

Above us, the moon was split perfectly in half — light and dark, symmetrical. It was the same phase that had hung in the sky the night his father was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident.

A psychic had one told him that his father would communicate through lightning. Since he never did, Nic was convinced that we lived in a random universe, and that if there was a God, it had forgotten about him.

I always fervently fought him on that.

I knew that life wasn’t random or accidental. I had been raised too close to the spirit world for that. My Mexican lineage raised me with my spiritual eyes open. So while Nic saw synchronicity as coincidence, I knew that it was the Divine’s way of communicating.

And in that altered, fevered clarity, watching the sky split open with light, I knew— with bone-deep certainty— that his father had sent that bolt.

That the veil had thinned.

That he and I….we were made for one another.

That’s how our story began.

With a love so consuming it it brushed me up against God in an undeniable way.

It lasted five years and one day before I broke his heart. I just couldn’t fight the gnawing sensation that life was leading me somewhere else, and I ripped us both apart.

And now, I found it impossible to believe that love of that magnitude would ever be possible again.

As Nic would say; lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

When I finished —when it had all spilled out of me— Huub didn’t dismiss my story.

He just held my gaze and said, quietly,

“You really do have a cosmic presence guiding your life.”

Then, after a pause:

“I understand how it could feel like you’re disrespecting God, leaving a relationship like that.”

And I cried, because who really ever understood that except for Nic, who had lived it with me?

That was our story — the one that lasted five years and one day before I broke his heart.

This isn’t that love story. But that’s where it started: with lightning, revelation, and a love so consuming it cracked me open to God.

Anyway.

That was then.

This is now.

But that’s the backstory that led me to believe that love of that magnitude would never be possible again.

Eventually, we made our way back to the cabin with our other gay friend Ben.

They had somehow messed up the booking for our rooms, and so I invited both Huub and Ben to sleep in my cabin.

Ben and I lay down first, limbs tangled in that platonic, post-party softness. Huub changed in the bathroom and then came back, sliding into the bed between us.

At some point, Ben drifted off.

Huub’s body was warm against mine.

And there it was.

Not fireworks.

Not lightning.

Nothing like that at all.

. Just a small, almost inconvenient curiosity rising through me.

Is there something there?

No.

It was the heart-opener.

We were just friends.

I stuffed the thought down, down, down.

But the question had already been asked.

That night opened up a new avenue of intimacy between us. We remained friends, but we would cuddle frequently, like that was a normal thing to do. It was all fine and dandy for a few weeks, until one day, while we were cuddling, our hips began swirling against each other’s, his breath on my neck, sexual tension steaming hot. Within minutes we pulled away from each other’s arching bodies, and moved to opposite ends of his couch to stop ourselves from making an irreversible decision. We were best friends. So what was that? He suggested we take some breathing room and I excused myself to go home.

He was radio silent after that, so a couple of days later I texted him, playfully, to address the tension.

“ok sooooo. Do we debrief, take a week to cool off and then reintegrate in like a week, or just never talk about it and carry on like monks? I’m open either way.”

And yet, I couldn’t stop my curiosity from taking over my mind, so I suggested we kiss to find out if we even had chemistry, and let me tell you! It was the most mediocre kiss you could imagine. It was barely a kiss. Two seconds in he pulled away after hardly parting his lips, and said:

“I think we should stop there and integrate.” to which I giggled and excused myself to go home. Such a strange man, I thought, such an overthinker, so closed off. We were SO extraordinarily different in matters of love.

The next day, I woke up to a long text from him. He’d hardly slept three hours because he was spiraling and ruminating, and he’d spent an hour crafting a message in which he told me, gently but directly, that “he knew in his heart that I wasn’t his life partner”—and if our little “experiment” meant more to me than it did to him, he couldn’t do it and we should “go back to how things were before” to preserve our friendship. I literally laughed out loud when I got that text. Hilarious. How could he know so definitively that I wasn’t his life partner?! It was such a pre-emptive statement.

The certainty of his text perplexed me. But, whatever, I thought. My person wouldn’t doubt that I was right for him, and he clearly wasn’t my person. I smiled, rolled my eyes, and thought, he had no idea what love was or what I could become to him. But it was perfect. If he had said anything else, I probably would’ve run.

“Great,” I told him. “I’m emotionally unavailable anyway. I can’t promise I’ll never feel something, but right now? Nope. Not going to happen.”

So we started this messy, half-disconnected adventure, hookups threaded through long, cerebral coffees, getting kissy in the back alley by my shabby garage apartment, pretending friendship could hold all that heat.