It was early in our story in Indonesia. I won’t pretend in front of you to protect your feelings: when Gabie and I met it felt instinctually and cosmically true.
One sticky afternoon on Batu Bolong I took my lunch at an open streetside cafe I frequented. It was a small but aesthetic spot part-owned by a Brazilian student and friend of mine, Cassio—a Fabio-haired, open-hearted, quietly ambitious young man with a deep desire for connection through movement.
He approached me at the table exuberantly, but as usual his exuberance was hidden under a slow and soft vocal cadence—and those lilting inflections characteristic of only Brazilian Portuguese. Da-dededeDAAda, they sing with a smirk and a beckon to good food always.
He said, “Hey man! I don’t think you’ve met my sister, Gabie. She’s also really into anime,” he beamed, with that encouraging and teasing grin of his.
She strode up like air, perfect bone structure right away and sky-blue hair which disappeared behind her and finished somewhere around her waist. I don’t even remember what she wore. She shook my hand and sat without hesitation, as if we’d only seen each other yesterday.
As the motorbikes hummed by precariously, we didn’t notice. Locked into a discussion about Bleach and Naruto, bubbling over with respect and awe of Japanese values and storytelling, I’m not sure how long we were there.
For months after that, we flickered in and out of each other’s lives—both falling into short destructive flings with exactly the wrong people. At the time she was enamored, but very skeptical. I was guarded and didn’t listen well, didn’t ask questions when I was nervous, and had a tension and intensity sizzling under my skin that disquieted people.
One day, something turned over.
Gabie and I were at her brother’s house—now my brother, Cassio—for his weekly grill of top-grade steaks in the back yard, as any proper Brazilian does. From the beginning I could sense he was centered around life, around family.
Anyway, I stood with Gabie and a friend of hers chatting just outside the door where the grill smoked and sputtered that rich fat of the land. It was a rare moment of listening for me [I did not listen well to strangers] and one of them asked me something… I can’t remember exactly… but I felt it to probe at the experience of communion with nature and its centering power.
I was struck by a wave of childhood memory that often visited me, pouring tranquility into my deepest confusions and sadnesses. I swallowed, dropped my shoulders and dared to tell them about it.
I was probably nine or ten years old, and my mother had fled with us illegally and against court order to Naples, Florida. I spent most days alone there, roller-blading and taking myself to the beach anonymously. Her boyfriend had let me borrow his diving mask, beautiful blood-red, cartoonishly big on my face and admittedly a little leaky. But it opened a whole world to me. In my hot pink laguna swim trunks, I swam in those seahorse shallows and looked at the creatures and textures undulating elegant in rhythms of earth’s compression and release.
During one of these excursions I felt arise in me this sudden whim to roll over and face the surface. I’d let out just enough breath to sink slowly until my sacrum bumped against the tidal floor with a little puff of sand and shells.
I looked up and was flooded with crystalline fractals dancing through the water’s surface, light spun like gentle disco and flower petals of teal and gold.
I truly do not know how long I was mesmerized there. I no longer required breath or activity.
Eventually, who knows when, I planted my feet and crowned my head slow through the surface barrier into the air again. Eerily, there was no death instinct to gasp for what was missing—but a sense I no longer needed it. I was full.
As I finished this story I knew I’d done something I didn’t mean to, as Gabie and her friend were quiet for longer than was natural for them. Then her friend said, softly, “Wow.” Gabie just stared wide open at me, as she does. I can’t remember if she said anything: only that terrifying look of soft somatic sensing remains in me.
We didn’t start anything that day; nobody made any moves. It would still take some months
for us to truly find each other.
Years later she would tell me this was the turning point for her. Finally she saw what she needed to see: a wellspring; an immutable and bottomless nature that values life and an overflowing Will to Love it in all forms. These are my pedantic worlds, of course, not hers. She probably only said something shattering like, “Then I knew.”
You know, for a long time I thought I was impressive. I’d worked so hard to acquire competency in many areas. I’d earned through true suffering and triumph to feel my feet in self and truth, and from this erupted a striking ability to say, “no,” and, “yes,” and mean these existentially. This was done through language, reason, and by forging a resilient, aware, capable body. I’d developed a strong capacity to acquire resources. These are the traits I thought got me in the door with Gabie.
Actually this was right to a degree. These traits were a fine mesh net which filtered for integrity, resiliency, self worth, intelligence, and resourcefulness. But none of this is what makes women fall in love.