[Pt 3.] Synchronicity Unfolding

Picking up where we left off last week…

I’ve never had one stable home in my entire life. Not as a child. Not as an adult. I’ve never lived in one place longer than a year.

Home, for me, has always been a dream I keep chasing but never seem to reach.

Anyway, those were the echoes — the subtle detonations reverberating through the landmine of my subconscious whenever Huub showed me too much love.

Because how could he ever understand the complexity of my wreckage?

So I just kept telling him he couldn’t expect anything from me, setting boundaries I wasn’t even sure I wanted to keep.

A few days later we went to our camp’s pre-Burn party at Elementum, and I still wasn’t sure I wanted to be seen with him.

Huub, ever intuitive, could feel my hesitation. He moved around me with this quiet attunement, adjusting his presence to the temperature of my nervous system and my testy nature.

“Do we act like we’re together? Or do we just act like friends?” he asked, trying to respect my wants & needs.

The question alone sent me spiraling.

This was our community. The same tight-knit Venice circle that had watched my life implode in real time — the breakup, the fire, the very public chaos. And now, almost four months after leaving my ex, only weeks after he’d gone to jail, I was… what? Suddenly entangled with my best friend?

I didn’t know. But I did know this: I wasn’t going to risk being seen in something I wasn’t sure of.

I had already lost credibility in my own eyes that year. I was tired of being the girl whose life was always a spectacle, and I was SO done being the storyline people talked about. I wanted to be in control.

“People hook up and date, you know that, right?” Huub said with a playful smile.

Then, softer, steadier, “I’m here to honor you though. Take your time.”

For the first half of the night, I kept my distance—hovering in the safe zone of friendship – socializing and floating from conversation to conversation, pretending like I wasn’t keenly aware of where he was at all times.

As skeptical as I was, my radiance and inner light was coming back because I was finally free of the chaos that I’d once been entangled within. So I danced and flitted around like the little fairy that I am.

Then, Dersu, our community DJ, did something completely absurd.

He played Let Me Love You by Mario.

Let me remind you: that song came out in 2004. It is not, under any logical circumstances, a track that gets dropped at a Burning Man-adjacent house party in 2025. It was comically and cosmically specific.

Because let me remind you, that Huub and I had connected over that song. Also, Mario & I go way back on Instagram, so the synchronicity of it all really felt like a cosmis chuckle.

My body reacted excitedly before my mind could process.

I ran straight to Huub, who was lounging on a couch, and shouted excitedly over the music, “Wanna dance?”

He hesitated for a split second, so I shrugged and said, “Well I’m going to go dance.” and walked toward the dance floor.

Seconds later he was beside me.

We sang every word, half laughing at the sheer randomness of it, and then he pointed at me during the chorus— unironically serenading me in a room full of people we knew.

“You should let me love you…”

It was so on the nose it was almost embarrassing. But in the moment, I didn’t care one bit. Music does that to me. It reminds me that I am free.

And then it hit me all at once—the microdose of mushrooms from earlier, the song from my teenage heartbreak years, the shared playlist, the way the exact track had played, the fact that we were in public, and the absurd synchronicity of it all.

Synchronicities like that, I’ve learned, are little winks from God.

And this one was loud.

My body started overheating and my ego snapped back online just as quickly.

Everyone could see us.

I needed air.

He didn’t ask questions. He just stood, took my hand lightly, and guided me outside, away from the noise, to a quiet corner couch tucked along the edge of the space.

He sat first and pulled me back into him, my back against his chest, his legs and arms bracketing my body like parentheses.

“That was… funny,” I said, still catching my breath, still pretending it had been casual.

“That was more than just funny,” he replied.

“I’m not ready to talk about it,” I blurted, fast, defensive, words coming quick before I could soften them, like I could sense there was a door there that I wasn’t yet ready to open.

He laughed — not dismissively, but with this deep, amused warmth, like my reflex to shut things down was something he already understood about me.

My heart was beating so fast that we could both feel it.

“Breathe,” he said softly.

Then he exaggerated a slow inhale, pressing it against my spine until my body followed his rhythm.

I stayed there in his arms for a long time, feeling, thinking, trying to make sense of the synchronicity. My mind wouldn’t stop.

I know all too well that synchronicity is the language of the Divine.

Eventually, it became too much, and I slipped away to find my friends.

The rest of the party felt like a medicine journey. Everything was heightened—the music, the air, my thoughts, the emotional undercurrent moving through my body.

But at the end of the night, when Huub and I left together for his place, something had softened within me.

The next morning, I woke slowly to find his ocean-blue eyes already on me, quietly assessing, as if he’d been awake for a while.

We were in that strange, tender pocket of time before the day fully begins– when the mind hasn’t yet reassembled its defenses, when the body is honest in ways the ego later edits.

I was processing out loud, as usual. He was listening, as usual.

“Last night… that synchronicity,” I murmured, still connecting threads. “Let me love you was the first song I put on the playlist.”

He smiled slightly.

“I was listening to that playlist,” he said, calm, almost matter-of-fact. “On my couch. Meditating.”

He paused.

“That’s when I got overwhelmed by my feelings for you.”

Another slow sigh, like he wasn’t sure if he should continue.

“That’s when I realized I’d fallen in love with you.”

He said it so casually, as if it weren’t the kind of sentence that rearranges an entire relationship.

Then he grinned. “But no pressure.”

“Huub…” I said, already contracting, “you can’t expect anything from me. I’ve been through too much. I’m… too broken right now. I need time. I like you, but I can’t promise you anything. You need to be patient.”

I went on saying this sort of thing, spilling out all the ways I was trying to protect him from me.

“I know, I know,” he said, brushing it off with that easy smile, like my emotional responses were all too predictable to him, “Let’s go get breakfast.”

No argument. No persuasion. No attempt to pin me down emotionally.

So we did. We hopped on his e-bike and rode through the soft Venice morning. The air still carrying that strange afterglow from the night before.

The waiter sat us at a small table on the terrace, and as I settled into my chair, the music overhead shifted.

All I Need by Maribou State.

I froze.

“Huub,” I said, my voice catching, “listen.”

He froze mid-scan of the menu, eyes going wide, tattooed fingers rising to cover his mouth in disbelief.

”all I need is your love.” the lyrics hummed over the cafe speakers.

He looked at me with this piercing, all knowing look of certainty.

“This,” he said in disbelief, “is the song I was listening to when I realized I loved you. ”

I buried my face in my hands too, both of us shrinking under the cosmic joke of it all.

“It’s too much,” I said. “This is the only other song you ever commented on from our playlist.”

We giggled at the cosmic coincidence of it all, staring down at the table.

I wanted to believe in magic, but coincidence was safer these days.

So I changed the subject.

The next few weeks blurred into a quiet rhythm.

We saw each other often; coffee runs, late-night talks, dinners and dancing in his kitchen, and lots of laughter. And though at this point I was sleeping at his house more nights than not, I was still convinced that at the core, we were just friends.

A few weeks went by, and then right before I left for Burning Man, Nic and I reconnected. We exchanged a few emails, then met on the beach for the first time in a year. Seeing him felt like coming up for air after holding my breath underwater for far too long.

We caught up without grief, without projection—just two people who’d once built a world together, now sitting in the wreckage with tenderness and no attachment to rebuilding.

He told me that I seemed more myself than ever “albeit traumatized,” he teased gently. And he was right. I was afraid of love in a way I had never been before.

My usually wide-open heart was locked in a tower, drawbridge raised, gates closed.

We both acknowledged that what we had was rare, and that we might never experience a bond like that again. But it no longer ached. It simply existed, like a thread woven into the fabric of my life.

Before we parted, we accepted what had always been true: we loved each other deeply, but it didn’t seem like we were meant to build a life together. Not in that way. Not in this lifetime’s trajectory.

I told him that I was done trying to force my will upon destiny, and instead, I wanted to listen to what life wanted for me.

And for the first time in a long time, I meant it. I was more surrendered than I’d ever been.

I told Huub about my meeting with Nic. I even told him that Nic would always be my twin flame, and that my person would have to understand that.

It’s like having another half of your soul out there somewhere. Like a family member. It’s a part of who I am.

As always, Huub received it with quiet grace. No jealousy. No pressure. Just presence.

A few days later, he sent me a letter.

In it, he admitted he could feel himself beginning to close off — wondering if I would ever see what he saw between us.

After weeks of spending nearly every day together, I was still in denial, and he was starting to lose hope.

He ended the letter by wondering, poetically, whether the dream of our love would burn down with the man at Burning Man… or rise like a phoenix from the ashes into something real.

I didn’t know the answer. But I remained honest every step of the way.

Going into Burning Man, my heart felt bruised, confused, and exhausted.

Part of me didn’t even want to go. But after the fire, after the chaos of the year, I had said something without thinking:

“I don’t think I’ll feel at home again until I’m back at Burning Man. But I’m only going to go if a ticket and a ride fall into my lap.”

And life, as it often does with me, took that statement seriously.

One by one, the impossible logistics solved themselves. A ticket appeared. A ride appeared. A place to stay appeared.

So I stopped resisting and accepted what felt undeniable: I was meant to go.

After weeks of preparation and packing, I hopped into my Subaru and drove down to my friends Miles and McKinsey’s house. Together, we packed everything we’d been obsessively organizing for months into the trailer, and at sunrise, we hit the road for Reno.

Before pulling out of the driveway, Miles led a little prayer — for my abuela who had been slowly dying for fifteen days. My native Mexican abuela, from whom I learned every bit of my connection to spirit. My abuela, from whom I inherited the painful pattern of love not lasting.

The night before we left, I had told Miles & Mckinsey my only wish: that my abuela would pass before I reached the playa (Burning Man), so that I knew she was at peace before I unplugged from society.

We bowed our heads and said a prayer for a gentle passing.

An hour later, my mother called me.

My abuela had passed — at the exact time we said the prayer.

After fifteen days of slow suffering, she was finally free.

Another little wink.

The drive was long, uneventful, almost purgatorial — ten hours of desert highway and processed snacks and gas station pickles and the faint hum of grief weaving through laughter. We arrived in Reno, stocked up on supplies, slept five short hours at our camp lead’s house, and then — we were off.

To the desert.

To the playa.

To Black Rock City — the place that only exists for one week each year, rising like a mirage from nothing but dust and imagination.

To be continued next week, this is where things start to get crazy. Next week’s newsletter will be paywalled as there are once again, many personal details.

If you missed last week’s newsletter, the context definitely makes this part of the story juicier. You can subscribe and enjoy and get all caught up.

Next part drops in 1 week!

Let me know in the comments if you’re enjoying the story thus far, and thank you for reading.

P.S. magic is real.

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Xx,

— Bela