Star Woman in Love (5 page)

Full communication had become erratic during the previous months, as from around the time she had started dating Gordon. We knew him and his very low, ego-driven frequency. Cassandra was enmeshed in his depleting vibration through the regular act of sex with him. Their relationship had clouded her mind to some considerable extent, but we still managed to communicate with her. We always got through during her meditations. Now she really needed our help or she would lose her way. We couldn’t let her lose the grip of her Star-heart. Our connection, however, was intermittent at best.

Gwen and Sam talked to Cassandra for an hour, hugging and reassuring her. The young man in boxer shorts prepared a hot-toddy: to help her sleep. When the pain finally appeared to have eased, they left her room. Cassandra undressed and went to bed. We raised our frequency again, until we eventually got through to her. She started to calm down. Her wailing receded. Her breath began to slow down until it became lighter and she fell asleep. Her powers were safe. Human-chrysalises always become very vulnerable, and life around them seems to fall to pieces, when their time for transformation is approaching. Despite her stellar ancestry, Cassandra was no exception. High time was drawing near. The most difficult part for us was to step back and let her do this on her own. The rules of the Plan are binding even for a soul of her calibre.

* * * *

My heart had precipitated to that gutter of an emotion. I could have sworn I would be sailing my way through to the destination. Paradise found without flexing a muscle, full stop. Oh no, far from it. I didn’t want to admit that Gordon had been a mistake. For all my so-called powers, I couldn’t let go of the hurt this rejection was generating. Disparate thoughts ran through my head. I’d been tricked by Gordon’s ego. I wanted to believe him when he said that he loved me. Why had I forced myself into such an unfounded tenet? I knew I was wrong, yet why did I take so much time to find the courage to face up to the truth? It was my all fault, I thought. And now what?

My ego proved stronger than I’d expected. In the end I fell asleep praying to the Universe to send me a sign. It wouldn’t fail me. I needed its help so badly. Restless sleep got the best of my internal chatter. I dreamt that I was being chased. I woke up in a sweat in the middle of the night. Pitch black in the room. Pitch black in my heart. I opened my eyes. The palm of my hand was lying on my pillow next to my face. It was emanating an almost liquid light of blue, purple and yellow: my aura. It was real, like an extension of my body.

My broken heart was showing me that. The cocoon had been pierced. Despite all that was happening on the outside, I was ready. My True Being was quickening and preparing to get out of its chrysalis. My powers had been switched on. Time for transformation. It felt so normal. I watched my reflection in the mirror: the Light stemming from my limbs made me look like a winged woman. I let the beauty of the experience sink in and become one with me. The magic of the moment made me feel drowsy once again. By 3 a.m. I had succumbed to deep slumber.

The morning of my twenty-fifth birthday jolted me out of the spell of sleep and into the ice splinters of reality. My alarm woke me up at 6 o’clock as usual. The day was cold. Time hit me like a whip.

“Shit!,"  I said, “I feel like shit!”

Despite my nocturnal occurrence, in the morning I couldn’t care less about auras, evolution and all that airy-fairy stuff. I wanted Gordon. I wanted to have sex with him. I remembered the mess he confessed he had made. I wanted to cry again. But my pride didn’t allow me to think about him for longer than a few seconds. I went to the kitchen on automatic pilot and put the kettle on.

“Instant coffee and a bowl of porridge will do: there isn’t much to celebrate today...”

Confusion still ran unbridled in my soul. I wanted to run away from my destiny. I wanted to forget it all and be normal. I craved an ordinary relationship. I needed to be loved too. I had had enough of my heavy heart and its stupid Key. The tall pine trees in the back garden were shaking at the whim of the blustery wind. I was at one with the weather: beaten and cold.

“Happy fucking birthday, Cassandra,” I hissed to myself.

Caffeine started to ground me. Sam and Gwen appeared unexpectedly, making such a racket with balloons, champagne and a chocolate cake. It was shortly after 6 in the morning, and yet they managed to organise a birthday do for little broken-hearted me. It was a gallant effort given their predisposition to sleep in and the fact that I’d kept them up until late with my scene the night before. I let my despair melt into the tender hugs of my friends. This moment of flat-sharing bliss only people in their twenties can appreciate lifted my soul and took my mind away from my sorrow, if for a little while.

Was I starting to feel better? I was grateful for my friends’ cheer and affection. Their kind gesture was in sheer contrast with my curse: the whole world loved me with the blatant exception of the one man I’d chosen. I had to accept it. I was aware that too much was at stake in my choice of a partner. I had just been reminded of that. I couldn’t even be spared on the eve of my birthday. My destiny had conspired against what had turned out to be yet another star-crossed affair of mine. Out on a limb, I didn’t know what to do. I could lose my mind over that. I needed protection and help but I was too proud to admit it. I wasn’t as capable and powerful as I thought I was. Ah, the foolish naiveté of my youth.

After my birthday breakfast, I decided to go out shopping for my presents. Something was calling me out despite the lousy weather and the sense of despair and loneliness that was playing havoc with my heart. I didn’t want to stay in and chill in my room, sitting by the fire reading a novel, or in the kitchen chatting with my friends. I didn’t fancy journaling either. Longing had taken over. There was a strong yearning inside me that didn’t belong to me. I was trained to recognise signs like this. The Earth wanted me to go out on a walk. She would send me signs and symbols until I would understand the message, the signposts she wanted to deliver. I threw my scarf around my neck and put on a woolly hat, big hiking boots and my favourite coat. I closed the front door behind me and stepped into my birthday storm.

I walked down Piper’s Crescent to the Film House. Images from the previous night were back on my mind. I felt as if I was nowhere: as if I didn’t exist and someone or something other than me was calling me into being. I roamed the lands of potentiality as the ghost of someone else’s dream, as the light of someone else’s hope, as a faltering light-beam in the throes of a hurricane. I found myself on Princes Street so I went shopping. It was one of my weaknesses even then. It would nullify my mind for a couple of hours.

My aimless wandering continued later. To my surprise, the signs of transformation returned unannounced on that windswept morning in February, on that fateful day consecrated to romantic love. The local human crowd didn’t seem to pay much heed. I was headed for the Old Town. In front of me, the Castle’s lonely silhouette stood out all alone against the ghastly sky, towering somewhat reassuringly as a backdrop to my personal drama. My delicate frame made me struggle against the wind, highlighting its brutality. I shivered in my tweed coat with my turquoise scarf wrapped up to my nose and my eyes staring at the menacing dark clouds above. On days like that I regretted leaving the warmth of Italy, my country, to follow my destiny on that harsh northern island. I was at my lowest, at my most useless. I went as far as hoping I would die.

Preoccupied as I was with those thoughts of despair bouncing in my head, how could I envisage that the Timeless Power was about to fully manifest through me for the first time? Gordon’s betrayal had to be part of the Plan. Throughout my romantic life, love had always worked mysteriously and disappeared in an equally baffling fashion. Burning a hole in my heart every time. Every single hole was my link to the Heart of the Earth. And the Earth was calling me, wooing me, drawing me into my true function.

The buses’ headlights shone but a faint ray of hope that I could soon find a canvas to express the knowledge I kept: a mirror for my heart. The gloom of the weather was contagious. I didn’t notice any trace of romance on the High Street. No couples were holding hands and kissing under archways. There wasn’t a smile in sight. Just the guts of umbrellas in waste bins, and passers-by bent over the tortures of their minds. The heavens were cut open by a blustery shower and icy rain was beating up the city. I forced my fairy-like body against the elements with tears now streaming down my cheeks. The cold whirlwind whipped my long curls onto my face. I couldn’t see the way ahead. My olive skin had turned a shade of grey. I looked like a homesick Mediterranean Banshee returning from a shopping spree.

“Poor dark sky, ripped open from the inside out just like my heart... Why did he choose to hurt me? Why did he turn my love down?”

My shopping bags flapped from my hands like the wings of a monstrous creature as I crawled against the storm. I was a weary urban ghost struggling along her way past shops decorated with love hearts, champagne flutes and chocolate boxes. They seemed to have popped out of some faraway, happier dimension in their complete oblivion of the weather outside and the moods it generated. I didn’t belong there. So why did I feel at one with the cold Siberian wind that was lashing on the streets?

“Devastated, cold and alone. Left in silence without an explanation. What’s the point? What for? And, above all, who for? How could he swap me for some amateur painter whose charms escape me and the rest of the country?”

Shivers rattled my bones and made me walk faster. I wanted to spit my anger out and rid myself of that loneliness that haunted me.

“This isn’t my true nature. I don’t belong with this sadness. It will pass. A shadowy illusion has entered my mind. I have to be careful. I am the keeper of a secret I am sworn to by my very origin...” 

I recited a mantra in my head.

“I am not a rejected woman. I am not going to fall into the cobweb of illusion spun by my ego. There is certainly much more to me than my attractive exotic looks.”

The flame of my wisdom was faint. That day wasn’t only my birthday, after all: it was also Valentine’s Day. And I was still single. Again. I really thought Gordon could learn to love me on my terms. I could teach him and squeeze him into the Plan one day. We still had twenty years to go before the Shift. As it turned out, he was just another temptation on the path. It hurt to know that his blond hair and muscular embrace had gone out of my life into some other woman’s. And a baby would make three. I wasn’t meant for low vibrations. I could only aim high. I wasn’t built to suffer. Yet the situation sucked and my human side sulked. I gave out a sob.

“Poor me, nobody seems to notice my heartache through this frenzy of raindrops and blizzards... nobody knows the meaning of Love...”  

Like a heroine from the silver screen I had combed the Edinburgh streets and roamed its pubs searching for him: the man who could put an end to my yearnings, whose glance would bring me peace and stillness, whose embrace would feel like home, whose encounter would signal the beginning of a process I wasn’t quite sure of but, as adepts had assured me, was written in the stars. It was very easy for me to allure the other sex. I was a lovely-looking woman in my mid-twenties. Men would often stop and do a double take at me. But true love still seemed to elude me.

“I’d always returned home carrying only the mere scraps of love: one-night stands, adventures, fun-loving moments. Until the day I met Gordon. I thought that was it, I had found my match. But oh no, far from it: that was the worst of my mistakes, and it has now turned into the biggest heartbreak."

Much more was at stake than simple match-making in my choice of a partner. Special blood flowed in my veins. Yet it meant fuck-all on the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday. Despite all my qualities, I had been discarded and substituted like a flat tyre. Where was that retarded true love of mine hiding? Looking for answers, I kept my eyes peeled and all my senses on alert as I trod down the Grassmarket. I hoped Maria-Carmen was at home. I walked past Greyfriars Cemetery. I could sense the echo of old Templar vows, the clanging of swords, the galloping of horses. Promises made and oaths taken there were still palpable in the air I was breathing. The gloom of the place became pervasive. I found it hard to believe in my predicament and honour my fate.

“Is my secret real or just the offspring of a delusional mind? Am I really who they say I am? Do I foster all those powers? How am I to harness them? Does the Dark Side I need to guard myself from really exist? Do I truly have such a central role in the Plan? And why can’t I date a professional golf player and settle for the joys of being a pretty Italian woman in Scotland? Why was I chosen to carry the torch of evolution?”   

I missed the turn for Maria-Carmen’s apartment and went past it. By the time I realised I was supposed to head to her place, I was already walking down the Royal Mile close to Holyrood Palace. The Tudor buildings reminded me of my timeless origin. A few people were walking down the street on the other side of the pavement. They looked like characters out of place. Inside me there was stillness, liquid silence, and the remarkable sensation of space without time that only the initiated can recognise as a sign of connection with higher dimensions. The most life-laden peace came upon me. My devastation became irrelevant. I was at the right space-time junction. My heart acknowledged that.

Then time stood still. The world went motionless and soundless. I slipped into eternity. I had switched that experience on myself. But I didn’t know how and why. Everything and everyone around me froze. Even the rain stopped in mid-air, paralysed in its fall. I touched the surrounding space: dry, weightless, invisible talcum powder. I ran my hands on the wall of the Edinburgh Tolbooth to my left: pleasant texture, like sand. I stroke the face of the middle-aged woman standing opposite me on the pavement. Soft wax. Her scarf fluttering to one side had been seized by this timelessness vacuum and had the consistence of wet jelly.