A Different Kind of Love Story
I want to tell you a story about the stranger who told me she loved me.
When I was in Bali this fall, I went to free ecstatic dance on Sundays. For an hour, I would dance completely freely on a deck overlooking the sea, basking in the heat and sweat of silent strangers.
Nobody spoke during ecstatic dance—it was a time for personal expression through movement. Sound, yes—there was music and howling, and cooing certainly oozed from our bosoms. But we didn’t speak.
One Sunday—my last in Bali, I couldn’t hold back tears during the dance. I stopped dancing occasionally to brace myself against the railing overlooking the beach and sob. When the dance wound down I laid on the floor next to other bodies, our faces planted sideways on the uneven wood panels of the treehouse floor, our eyes gazing at one another and into eachother.
I let my snot and tears drip over the curve of my cheek and pool on the floor around me. I didn’t care if I was seen. I felt safe.
As I packed up my things to leave, a girl I’d seen on the dance floor came up to me. I recognized her bright blonde hair, and remembered seeing it splayed on the floor next to me at the end of the dance. She must have seen me cry.
“Can I give you a hug?” She asked. Her question was full of something—something I don’t normally sense in that question, can I give you a hug. She seemed to want to offer me something—to gift me something with her question. I couldn’t place it—but I felt invited to accept.
“Yes,” I replied.
She pulled me close to her, and for a few minutes, we cried in eachother’s arms. We rocked eachother back and forth, this stranger and me.
When I pulled away from the hug, she held my shoulders and looked me in the eye—gently, softly. I didn’t feel scared or uncomfortable by so much contact. I waited. Something more was coming. Another gift, perhaps, I wasn’t sure. But I could feel it in her gaze.
She smiled. With tears in her eyes, and a small laugh—the kind of laugh that happens when you are so happy that a small shudder of joy shakes and trembles through you and puts tears in your eyes—she said, “I love you.”
I can’t describe the feeling that welled up inside me in that moment. It was as though before she said I love you I was an empty vessel, vacant and cold, and in that moment, when she said I love you a warm, thick and tangy liquid flowed into me—so rapidly, with so much spark and spice that I felt it inside my skin, like fairy dust was brewing in my bones and I was seeing and feeling color for the first time.
I pulled her close again, and whispered through tears “I love you too”. I don’t know how, but I did. I loved her.
A stranger has never said “I love you.” To me before. And I never would expect them to mean it if they did. And even if they meant it, I would never expect to believe it.
But she really loved me.
And in that moment I learned something that no book or mantra or lesson could teach me. That love is not something I learn to give or learn to receive. Love is not something I earn or offer based on a condition. Love lives inside of my body, because it lives inside of yours, because it lives inside of our cells—because it lives in the trees and the stars and the air we breathe.
I don’t choose to love you—I already do. What I chose is to hold love close, or withhold it, or fear it, or reject it. But love is there. And in this moment today, I’m letting go. I’m relieving myself of fear of love. Rejection of love. Withholding of love. Because it’s inside of me, and I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.