A SOUL MATE

Today, while sipping my Starbuck’s iced-latte at a table outside a Godiva Chocolate Shop, where my husband was ordering an ice cream cone, a man approached me to ask me the time. “Excuse me, do you have the time?”

“No, I’m sorry,” I smiled. “I never have the time.”

It was true. It’s been years since I’ve worn a watch, and more often than is the case for most, I don’t even have a cell phone with me. At that moment, I really had no idea what time it was. He smiled back; put his hand on my shoulder; and asked if I were okay, in the kind of way that made me want to reassure him: Yes, I’m okay.

Maybe a woman in modern day America who didn’t have the time caused him some concern; then again, he didn’t “have it” either, so I’m not sure this would have alarmed him at all. I think it’s more likely that his concern grew from seeing me moments before (I had noticed him), this time sitting on a park bench, staring into my daydreams with a sad, distant look on my face—or so I imagine this is how I seemed. Perhaps it was that I looked sickly to him at a body weight of about 85 pounds with my ribs showing through the barely-there dress that covered-over my bikini. A combination of all of these things creates a picture of a fragile being not quite of this world and one for whom another such being might have compassion. For whatever reason—and in any case, one that I will never know for sure—he seemed to care; and this touched me deeply.

The man searching for the time was good looking. At about 6’ tall with sun-tanned skin and light-colored, very matted, and long hair, he was the kind of guy I fantasize about dressing in those dreams when I’m a famous designer of men’s clothes. He had the kind of form that transforms clothing into art, and a face to go with it. But it was not this that caught my attention and affected me profoundly the remainder of the day.

It was something else.

My sense was that he was an artist who found his home on the streets of Miami. His aura of nonconventionalism mixed with the softness of his spirit against the (imagined?) toughness of his life circumstances, evoked my instantaneous love for him—I had originally wrote, in one of those Freudian slips of the keyboard, love for me.

Telling.

I felt as though he could understand me. As though his soul grasped mine, without any words needing exchange at all. That he was one of those soul mates of mine walking around this earth separately; yet on some other plane, connected. And this made me love him, and through him— perhaps— me.

It is not just that he reflected me, in the sense of my seeing myself in him in some indirect way. Rather, it is the understanding… the grasping… the seeing into my soul, which evokes the love, and reminds me that there is much less distance than we often experience between incarnated souls sharing the space of this earth.
I hope to see him again. If not on the street, and not in my dreams, then on that Soul Plane wherein we are all connected. Where seeing and feeling are one. Where a sort of grapsing of one another happens instantaneously. Where moments count more than anything else. And where love for another is love for oneself. I graps him, and love him, now.