The Story of M: Part 3

When I looked up into the pale blue of her eyes she seemed almost as shocked as I was. My hands trembled.

            “Do you feel that?” I asked, stupidly, I guess.

            She nodded, speechless, staring into my eyes. It was everything I could do not to lean over and just kiss her mouth, or hold her pressed against me. We were both just radiating out to each other and I could feel her all over me—like her skin was covering mine and I knew in that instant, I fucking knew, that I loved her. I couldn’t help it. She was like the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, or felt, or been in the goddamn presence of. We moved closer and closer together. There were tears burning my eyes.

            What the fuck was happening?

            I almost couldn’t take it—the intensity was cutting into the very center of me.

            I gasped and I felt her warmth and the pressure of her hand on me.

            And then, suddenly, she jerked away.

            Someone was calling her.

            “M, M, it’s time to go.”

            She looked shaken and then she turned to face me again and we both just started laughing and laughing so uncontrollably—like little children.

            There was really nothing I could do.

Just sort of instinctually I reached into my bag and handed her my book.

            “Look,” I said. “I wrote this. I mean, this is my life. You don’t have to read it or anything. But, uh, I feel like I have to give it to you.”

            And then I wrote my email address on the front page, only, I could barely make it legible, my hands were shaking so goddamn badly.

            “Hey,” I said. “Write me if you want. I’m Nic, by the way.”

            Her eyes shone, right?

            “I’m M.”

            She sprinted away, obscured by the crowd.

            I couldn’t even watch her leave.

When I took my seat on the airplane I fell instantly into this deep, almost delirious sleep. I dreamed of M. She was inside me. I was talking and talking with her, though I can’t remember what we said.

            M was with me the entire flight.

I had to hurry to make my connecting plane to Savannah, so I ran across the airport without seeing her again.

But she was with me.

I couldn’t shake her.

I tried to tell a few people about what happened, but they just made me feel crazy and I ended up laughing with them about my Jesus freak encounter. Anyway, it does sound crazy. I mean, I know that.

So it was really just two weeks later that I checked my email late at night and saw that M had written me.

She said she’d been thinking about me and she finished my book and she was back from Nicaragua and she wrote me all about her time there. Her writing was so effortless and whatever. It was like I could feel her with me through her words.

So I wrote her back.

That’s how it started—just writing back and forth like that.

I learned about her childhood, I learned about her life, you know, just day to day.

And the more I learned, the more I fell, ha, deeper and deeper. I swear to God I couldn’t fucking help it.

In terms of all the crazy religious stuff, well, somehow I managed to pretty much dismiss all that. I guess I’ve always been pretty good at compartmentalizing. Her religious babble was filed away in a place of total, uh, denial in me. My head just discounted it all somehow. I knew there was nothing to it and I wasn’t gonna hold that against her. The whole story was too perfect. I couldn’t abandon it over a few email references to Holy Ghost Power, or whatever.

            Anyway, it was only a few weeks later that she gave me her phone number. After all we’d been through, it seemed sort of stupid that I was so nervous to call her. Maybe part of me was terrified that our connection wouldn’t really exist if we were actually talking to each other.

Maybe part of me was terrified that it still would.

            But her voice came through to me like the sweetest, most calming, positive, alive, beautiful, hopeful thing I’d ever heard.

It sent me, you know?

            And then, on the phone, our voices echoing back and forth, I could suddenly feel her presence again there next to me. She giggled and breathed and I breathed and we breathed together. And we had this love going back and forth. And it made no sense. And I couldn’t explain it. And it scared the shit outta me. But it was. I mean, it was as real as anything.

            Or, at least, that’s how it felt.

            Now, of course, I couldn’t talk about this shit with anyone. I mean, everybody would’ve thought I was just crazy and, well, I fucking was.

            But the more I talked to M the more convinced I became that I needed to drive up to Northern California and see her.

I’d lie in bed and talk to M for hours. A lot of times we wouldn’t say anything at all, but she was with me and I felt this heat and fluttering inside and energy coursing through me.

“I need you to come be with me,” she’d half whisper. “I just want to lie down in your presence.”

It was like we were existing in this in-between place. Our souls had left our bodies and had met together somewhere in the middle. I got to be away from myself, from my life—from the boring, average, day to day whatever of living in sobriety—stable—with a stable fucking relationship and all that. I got to feel fucking alive again.