My body is an ocean.
An ode to a form that sometimes feels formless.
Today as I was on my walk through the streets of London, to go to get my morning coffee, these words washed over me…
My body is my lover.
My body is my Mother.
My body is my daughter.
My body is the city.
My body is the ocean.
My body is mine; and not mine, all at once.
I have been reflecting on this alot lately — particularly over the last year, watching my body shapeshift and change in response to my lovers.
In particular, two interesting experiences have made me realise, just how permeable, malleable and “not my own” this body is.
How it belongs to me, but it also belongs to the ocean. It also belongs to the city streets my feet made contact with this morning.
It belongs to me, but it also does not.
Just last year, something in my body magically healed, through my relationship, after years of trying to “work it out” on my chiropractor table and beyond.
A tension in the back of my heart. A circle of numbness over my right scapula. One that has been there my whole life.
I have had weekly network spinal chiropractic care for nearly a decade, working on this exact tension.
It would move, then, like a spring, it would recoil again slowly… progress, and then retraction.
It wasn’t until last year, on the network chiropractic table, when all of a sudden, my body was able to breathe a little more deeply into my heart, that I realised — it’s gone.
What I was processing at the time of receiving the work, was the deep grief that was moving through me in relationship to a man that I was with (and am still with, in some sense), that bought back memories of past lives together — many, not just one.
The connection was unlike anything I have ever experienced, and I wrote a whole book based upon my experience — it comes out this week and is called The Shape that Love Refuses to Take and is an ode to soul based love.
The relationship unlocked memories and grief of a past love that I feel I have been searching for my whole life.
And the most interesting part? He had the exact same tension in the right side of his heart. Although, his maniested more physically, more grossly, as a physical lump in the exact same area.
Since meeting him, my heart has opened in ways I did not know were possible — it continues to contract and expand beyond what I would have been able to have had access to alone. And ailments I have lived with, are…disappearing.
If “twin flames” were a true mythology that I believed in, these past years would have confirmed my ideology.
What is interesting, is that this mythology has been written about in history.
In Plato’s Symposium, the playwright Aristophanes tells the story of the original humans. We were not, he says, what we are now. We were whole — four arms, four legs, two faces looking in opposite directions. Spherical. Complete. So complete, in fact, that we threatened the gods.
And so Zeus split us.
Not as punishment — as a severance that would keep us humble, searching, perpetually incomplete. He cut us down the middle, pulled the skin around to heal the wound, and left us here — half-creatures, wandering.
“Love is born into every human being,” Aristophanes says. “It calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”
I used to think this was poetry.
Then I met a man who carries the same wound I carry — in the same place, on the same side of the body. His manifesting as a physical lump where mine lived as a circle of numbness. Two bodies. One injury. Written in flesh, across lifetimes.
What healed in me, healed through him — not because he did anything, not because he fixed me. But because the field between us remembered something that my body alone had forgotten. The chiropractic table held me for a decade and could not reach it. Love reached it in a year.
Perhaps the splitting was never only mythological. Perhaps it is quite literally written into our tissue — the places we cannot breathe into alone, the tensions that live in us like an unanswered question, waiting for the one whose wound mirrors our own. Not so that they completeus, but so that in their presence, we remember that we were never, in truth, incomplete.
The search for the other half is the search for ourselves.
And sometimes — the body knows before the mind does.
