A few nights ago, I got pressured into meditating. It’s been a long while since that’s happened, this pushpushpush to see something. It’s also been awhile since I’ve been sober enough at the end of the night that I can even hear anyone.

These days, I usually show up and I’m already inside the bedroom of the beach house. This time (again for the first time in a long time), it wouldn’t “load.” The images kept stalling out, stuttering as if they were on a broken reel of film.

I closed my eyes and took a breath, letting whatever I was supposed to see wash over my eyes. When I opened them, I saw myself outside the beach house, looking in.

“Oh no,” I said out loud on the sand, knowing I could be heard. “It’s never good news when I start outside the house.” I used to see it like this so often when things were hard, broken, ruined.

As I approached, the house appeared to be up a slope that slowly turned from sand to grass. When I stood in the glass patio doorway that led into the bedroom, I saw that the inside wasn’t the same either. The golden beachy hardwoods were dark oak, teak. The whites and turquoises were hunter green and charcoal grey. Beautiful, but alien.

I was so baffled by how the house was the same and different at the same time that at first, I didn’t notice the people in the bed.

Tangled between the sheets were a beautiful, olive-skinned woman with a long, thick jungle of dark hair, and a soft, thin man with a highly angular face- two people I immediately recognized, but didn’t want to.

Instead, I stared blankly at it, confused. Why was I seeing this? Why was I here? Where was this?

I walked into the open plan living room/kitchen and saw other scenes- the two of them laughing and cooking together, dancing in the living room, kissing on the couch. I watched it all suspiciously, my mood bordering on annoyed, disgusted.

I spun around, back towards the bedroom, and my oldest friend was standing in the doorway. He had That Look on his face- weary and disappointed, struggling for grace. A look I have unfortunately have grown used to seeing over the last fourteen years.

This time, though, it didn’t seem to be directed at me.

Well. Not me.

He looked different too- his features were sharper, his skin slightly darker. He glanced at the bed, pointedly, and then turned his searing golden eyes back to me.

“You wanted to know where he was,” he said softly. “You kept asking and asking, worried that he might be out in the world. Well.” He swept his arm wide, as if unveiling a grand prize. “Here he is.”

I was still baffled, holding my palms out helplessly at the bed that contained Alex and my Entire Self. “Okay, but this is…”

“This is now. Well.” His head dipped to one side. “Whenever now is. I have no idea what day it even is there. But like… this is currently happening. This is recent, not a memory.”

I still couldn’t understand, looking back and forth between him and them. “Okay, no but. Like. She’s with him?”

His eyebrows raised with a bit of sadness, a commiseration with my lack of comprehension. “Yes.” Then he shrugged, sighing deeply. “Maybe. I don’t know. She’s… sequestered with him, at the very least. I can’t tell if it’s to keep him away from you, or because…”

His mouth twisted bitterly, his eyes trying not to look at them. “Because this is what she actually wants.”

“Can’t you just ask-“

“She won’t speak to anyone.” He shrugged again, this time with a touch more anger, a mouth of lemon. “So maybe that’s why it seems like I am trying to soak up as much time with you as I can. I guess it’s selfish, greedy maybe. But I don’t honestly know what her motives are. And neither do you. Everything may change once you come Home.”

I peeked back at the bed again, turning slowly to watch the series of images in the living room and kitchen. “But I mean, who I am now doesn’t matter? The connection we have in this life is… meaningless?”

He sighed from the bottom of his soul, and I saw real pain cross over his face, an expression I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before.

He looked so real- nothing like a dream, or a memory, or a figment of my imagination. If you’ve never really seen people in meditation, you can’t understand. His face is so familiar to me. I have known him since before time was time.

“She’s… ruthless, Kristyn. You’re the best version of her so far, by far, but you don’t understand how she can be. She does whatever she wants to accomplish her end goal. Nothing and no one else matters. It is highly effective, but it is…”

He smiled, wan and thin, centuries of heartbreak. “It is hard on the people who love her. And whatever she has with him… it consumes everything else.”

This last shrug was helpless. “We don’t have to understand it for it to be true. I just have to have faith that she knows what she’s doing.”

Does she?

Do I?