One morning in a white washed room in South Pasadena...

You wake one morning in a white washed room in South Pasadena, for example. You are just another guy making his way through life, no scratch that, fighting his way through life, because it is always a fight, for some reason it has to be. But you wake smiling, you wake feeling kind of free, you wake to the sound of a woman's voice and you remember how you came to be there. You don't move, don't open your eyes too much because you don't want to lose the feeling you are in. It is a beautiful feeling, and one your heart knows is fading from the moment you find it. There is an ache in that, deeper than I want to dwell on here.

So she is speaking, and her soft, silky smooth voice just adds to that sense of abandon that you feel to love, to perfection, to belonging somewhere just for a moment. And you realise, that is what you have been missing, pining for most your adult life; just the feeling that you are in a place where you finally, truly belong.

You don't reply to whatever she is saying, you just lay there, savouring it, breathing it in, healing the wounds like a salve. Each word she speaks you use in this way. Something so simple as her morning bathe and scatter to pull herself together for her working day, to you, is something spiritual, beautiful and good.

'There is coffee in the pot, if the kittens crap would you mind slinging it into the bin else they just wont use the litter tray again...oh and I'll be back for 6pm I promise.' She says, as she passes in and out of the bedroom picking things up, putting them down, rushing, rushing to catch up with the schedule of her day that began before she did.

I say nothing, just watch her movement through half closed eyes, the room glows white as the sun is starting to push its morning light through the gaps between drapes and door edges hunting to dispel the last refuge of the night. I think to myself - If I died here right now, this would be OK, yea this is a good moment to leave all this.

I feel something bubble up in me, it is happiness, it is that feeling of belonging, and I want to say just one thing to her; 'I love you'. But this is a dream, in a white washed room in South Pasadena, for example. A beautiful stranger is showing signs of being in love with me, and I am falling in love with the dream of it happening. I wonder how many times a soul is willing to go through the same cycle of magic, everything rises to fall away again and be gone. Could we ever really belong to anything for more than just a while? The question really does not matter because I leap, I always do.

'I come free of baggage' I had pronounced to her proudly as we drove through the night not long after meeting. She glanced at me, then back at the road.
'Everyone has got baggage' she said quietly.
It dawned on me then that I was more naive than I thought, and she was smarter. I liked that. I didn't reply, letting the truth of her statement sink into me and unearth my mistake.
We moved on down the freeway, two more people in a metal box behind and in front of a billion others, it could have been a conveyor belt. All looking at the lights of downtown LA as we passed, all wondering where life was going, and then later, for reasons I will never really understand, she let me in.

The trouble was that we never really knew what 'Love' looked like. How could we ever hope to know that what we found was right? I lay there in the white washed morning, in the June sun of a dream that was expanding inside me like the flower of romance growing in a soil rich in pain, anxiety and mistakes. Sure, I had baggage, lots of it, just like we all did. The garden was South Pasadena. The bloom was exquisite; the colours felt like deep hues of her brown mixed with my purple, red and blues. The DNA of love, the mingling of chemistry, the ignition of energies merging to evolve. Love was scientific, you could analyse it in a lab. You could predict its ascent and fall. Some could, those who had that kind of knowledge, those who didn't fall blinded by it's glare.

She called me by the name of her ex-boyfriend before she finally left that morning. I found it amusing, but could see she wanted to take the moment back more than anything in the world.
'Look, really, it's OK' I said truthfully. I didn't feel she owed me anything, not yet.
'God I am so sorry, I just got confused, really please don't think it is me thinking about him or ....' I put my hand to her lips, she was perfect to me. How long would this belief in a love of her last? I wanted to know. I needed to know. How could this be love? It couldn't be, right? Generally I was a naive romantic, right up until the point I returned to being just a selfish asshole.

She left the house, probably one of the most sincere women I had ever met, the kind I would marry if I thought myself capable of making such a liaison last forever. Dreams rise to fall again, love rises to fall again. It's like they say - 'Kissing don't last, cooking does' and they are right. Each time I slip into her I feel a part of me wanting to create life. I never felt a willingness to this before, this is like the soul wishing to relinquish responsibility, readying itself to die and leave some kind of legacy. I have known this woman for only a few weeks, either I am getting old or...I am getting better at knowing how this world works with me in it.

So, you wake one morning in a white washed room in South Pasadena, for example. Your home, your heart, your past lies in a decaying island thousands of miles away, in a history light years away and moving fast, but the longing, the mark it leaves behind can never be forgotten. You have grown strong, grown walls and wisdom enough to protect whatever it is that one finds inside the flesh of a body; that stuff we think of as maybe life, or spirit, or a man.

Her voice is enough to remind you that dreams exist, that heaven is a dream, that wishes can come true for the briefest of moments. And you find yourself wishing that same wish you have made many times; Magic conjures itself about you, barely visible but if you are smart, you know it is there, you know what is happening in that moment, precisely. The dream, the longing, the wish, has manifested itself into flesh.

She walks about the room, you watch those hips, that golden hair, the divine feminine, and you desire it on so many levels, because you need it. There was never any choice. Freedom? No one wants freedom, we need to belong, to some moment, to some place, to someone.