The Eating-Too-Much-of-an-Edible-to-Seem-Cool-in-Front-of-your-New-Boyfriend to Having-Otherworldly-Visualizations-that-Lead-you-to-Believe-you-Knew-him-in-a-Past-Life pipeline
Heather Sillins. January 22, 2024
(Photo via Vice)
I first met my now-boyfriend when I was coming out of a toxic relationship. I was really in no place to be starting over with someone new, but the pull I felt towards him was undeniable, so in true 21-year-old fashion, I said fuck it and took a leap of faith. We had been dating only a month or so when he invited me to spend the night and take some edibles. I ate more than I should have with great confidence – as if it would make me seem like it wasn’t one of the first times I had done edibles (once again, in true 21-year-old fashion). Well, about an hour in I started to completely trip out. I was laying in his arms, in his bed, when I began thinking about how new the whole thing was. I spent the year prior feeling like my legs were buried two feet underground in a sandstorm due to my last relationship turning in a direction I had never expected. Perpetually flirting with leaving my ex but incapable of committing for far too long. On a random Friday night I was able to make the dash and ran directly into someone else’s space. I was happy about it, but somewhat alarmed by how quickly I was moving on. Now I was in a new man’s bed with my head on his chest, out of my mind off half an edible, trying to act like everything was how it should be. I felt weird. I felt like I knew him so well without really knowing him at all. I felt shocked by my ability to leave my ex-boyfriend of 3 years in the dust one random Friday night. I felt so at home and so confused by the comfort this new person brought me. I told him I needed to close my eyes and turned away from him so he wouldn’t see the thoughts written on my face. My eyes were closed, my mind was racing. Suddenly, in my mind's eye, I was looking into a slightly shifting milky glaze – comparable to looking at a glass slide through the lens of a microscope. After a few seconds the space was stained with purple and blue dye. The dye swirled around before falling into its form – the side profiles of two skulls – one larger – blue, and one smaller – purple. In an intuitive wave, and with no cognitive reasoning, I somehow knew it was us. It felt like an image of our souls resting together in a past life. I imagined a different version of us buried next to each other in a cemetery plot somewhere in the world. I internalized it as a sign that I was where I was supposed to be. That this person I had only known for a few months was going to end up being someone very important to me. Someone that changed my life. Someone that showed me what the word love really meant. I felt overwhelmed... and a bit out of my mind. Here I was with a brand new person, panicking in his bed, on an internal spiritual journey uncovering our past and future, and I couldn’t even tell him because I had only just met him. But I felt it without a hint of doubt. All my fear of starting over with someone new melted away that night. It was the only time I felt connected to a life that I, consciously as my now-self, had never lived. A few months later he told me I was the color purple. He wasn’t sure why, he just saw purple and thought of me. Again, a wave of peace came over me. Still, I didn’t tell him what that meant. A year or two later, I told him what I felt that night. He laughed at the thought of a younger version of me panicking over a sense of destiny while he was oblivious next to me – totally enamored by Regular Show or Shark Tank or whatever mindless show we had on. It’s been nearly four years since that moment and it still leaves me with a sense of clarity that I can’t quite explain.