“How whole are you?”
I leaned back on the motorbike, as my sixteen year old Balinese driver pressed on with increasing speed through the winding jungle roads of Nusa Penida.
When I didn’t answer, he repeated his question—
“How whole are you?”
“I need a moment to sit with that, Echo.”
Surely, I thought, this must be a Balinese get-to-know-you question. In my own culture, it’s unusual to explore the depths of one’s wholeness at first acquaintance.
But, however nonchalantly he asked, it had an impact.
How whole am I?
After a few moments of contemplation and gripping the back of his bike for dear life, I said, “I am very strong in myself and who I am.”
He nodded once and said nothing more.
“But there are times when I forget,” I added, “and I’m healing more of those pieces as they show up.”
Satisfied with my answer, I looked up at the sky, which was colored with the pink and purple hues of sunset. Dark was settling into the island and soon, it would feel like a thick, black blanket had been pulled over the day.
Without realizing it, Echo’s question had shaken loose a sense of sadness that pooled in my chest.
Earlier, I had been questioning my “whole-ness.”
I was wondering what part of me was broken—what part continues to play into a pattern I know all too well when it comes to romance.
This very pattern, that I gave over to be purified only five days before, had cosmically wiggled its way into my life in the days that followed. Even though it continues to have a shorter and shorter shelf life, when it occurs, it feels like a lifetime.
To meet someone who is a perfect representation of who you are—it’s divine.
It’s the kind of spark where you can love and lose in the blink of an eye; in the span of a second.
To find that mirror in the world, no feeling can compare.
To lose that mirror, a part of you shatters with it.
The mirrors I’m drawn to are always somewhere else. And what could be, can not.
Possibility is the worst kind of death.
In the morning, we made our way to Diamond Beach—a crescent of sand with an ocean every shade of blue…
My god, the beauty.
Surveying the swirls of sapphire and aquamarine, I spotted one lone swimmer. He was as small as an ant, floating on his back in the cove’s giant mouth.
“I need to be there,” I pointed.
And we started our harrowing descent down hundreds of tiny steps.
When I finally met the turquoise water, I swam far beyond a point of comfort and let my body float on the surface.
Salt filled my ears and sound collapsed.
The waves held me, gently.
It’s moments like these where you come up close to your aliveness.
With the giant limestone formations looming in my periphery, I thought about the nature of a diamond—how it takes heat and pressure and billions of years to form and even more pressure to burst forth from the molten layers of Earth.
Perhaps it’s the same for me too.
Perhaps each of these sparks are adding up.
They reveal another piece of what’s possible and then they’re gone, leaving the lesson and enough hurt to catapult me to the next layer.
I think I’m getting close to the surface because the sparks are shorter, more intense, and the men and our connection are even more aligned and beautiful.
That divine, diamond partnership I know I’m here to experience is on it’s way.
And the ones that were lost in the process, can go.
I’m not broken; they don’t take away my wholeness—they’ve supported me to create it. They’ve shaped the strong sense of who I am; the self I’ve become.
It was then that I passed my sorrow to the sea.
And declared,
Now—
I am ready.
Poor Echo.
About five minutes after I answered his profound question, it dawned on me that he was actually asking: HOW OLD ARE YOU?
“How OLD are you, miss?”
“OH! *face palm* I’m 30.”
Crazy American.
With love & heart,
-Kayla
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