I Found Me Inside Her

They told me I’d find The One. They never said I’d have to die to meet her.

The first time I felt anything close to God, I was face down in my own silence, choking on the version of me the world said was lovable. And even then, I wasn’t crying over a man, or a woman, or a label—I was grieving how long I’d pretended not to know myself. Because truth doesn’t whisper forever. Eventually, it kicks the fucking door down.

They say twin flames are mirrors. But they forget to mention what happens when you look—and flinch.
What it costs to finally stop hiding in desire that feels safe and choose desire that feels true.

Before I ever touched their skin, I met the ghost of myself I’d abandoned to survive. The version of me who made herself smaller, straighter, quieter. The version who smiled when society said “relationships are between a man and a woman” even though her body was already screaming. The version who said maybe I’m just waiting for the right man while knowing damn well she wasn’t waiting—she was stalling.

Because the truth? I didn’t come out. I bled out.
And queerness didn’t arrive with a rainbow—it arrived with a funeral.

A funeral for the girl who betrayed herself to be accepted. A funeral for the good daughter. The straight-passing, easygoing, “not like the others” Black girl. The one who kept praying for God to make her holy without realizing her holiness had been in her queerness all along.

I’m not here to explain that to you. I’m not here to make it digestible.
I’m here to say that I am a fucking altar.
And when they touched me, it wasn’t new—it was a reminder.

Because love like that doesn’t show up until you’ve already started remembering.
Until you’ve met the twin inside you first.
The masculine that doesn’t dominate and the feminine that doesn’t shrink.
The rage. The softness. The contradiction. The fire.

We talk about twin flames like it’s romantic.
Like it’s soft and sexy and spiritual.
But the truth is, mine came after I set my whole damn self on fire just to feel real again.

And what I know now is this:
They didn’t complete me. They witnessed me.
And that’s the difference.

Queerness was never a deviation. And it sure as hell wasn’t a phase.
It was my return.
Not to who I was told to be, but to who I had always been—before patriarchy, before doctrine, before they taught me how to disappear.

So no—I didn’t fall in love.
I recognized a mirror that refused to let me lie to myself.
And it fucking wrecked me—in the best way possible.

⸻

The first time I saw them, I didn’t feel attraction. I felt recognition.
Not new, but again.
Like the space between us had already happened. Like this life was a continuation of a vow I forgot I made.

It didn’t start with butterflies.
It started with breath.
The kind that catches in your chest before anything has been said. The kind that makes you reach for words you haven’t used in years, or maybe lifetimes.

They walked in, and something in me sat up straighter.
Like I had been waiting to be found in the soul-space where time doesn't matter.
Like they knew the version of me I hadn’t become yet—and were calling it forward with just their presence.

And in that moment, I understood why people run from love like this.
Because when someone sees you—really sees you—you can’t hide behind performance. You can’t pretend you’re casual about things that are meant to undo you. You can’t flirt your way out of what your soul already agreed to.

The scent of their skin reminded me of somewhere.
Some time.
Some incense-soaked altar, or forest clearing, or dimly lit temple where we once made promises with our eyes instead of our mouths.
I can’t prove any of it.
But my body knew. My memory lived in skin. And the heat between us wasn’t about sex—it was about remembrance.

Before there was touch, there was tension.
Not the kind that begs for release—but the kind that demands presence.
Their gaze cracked something in me. Not with force, but with clarity. A spiritual scalpel. A holy dare:
Are you willing to be known?

Because that’s what twin flame energy does. It doesn’t seduce. It summons.
And being summoned is not always soft.

I didn’t melt into them. I collided with them.
They held up a mirror and I saw the parts of me still afraid to shine. Still afraid to lead. Still afraid to take up space in a world that taught me to shrink if I wanted to stay safe.
But their presence made shrinking impossible.

This wasn’t love like I’d learned.
This was love that stared back.
That stood its ground.
That said “I will not let you unsee yourself again.”

And I hated them for it. And I loved them for it.
Because only a mirror like that could make me finally put the mask down.

And in the silence between us, I swear I heard something ancient.
Something older than language. A vibration that moved through the air like memory dressed in heat.

The first time I asked God what this was—how we knew each other—I was met with one answer, spoken like thunder: From the beginning.
I asked again, and the voice said it again: From the beginning.
So I stopped asking and started listening.

And what I was shown was two balls of light—floating in a vast, endless darkness.
No planets. No timelines. No names.
Just motion.

When one rose, the other rose.
When one dipped, the other followed.
Not chasing. Not leading.
Moving in rhythm.
Every shift in one mirrored by the other.
Not because they were trying. Because they were made that way.

A matched pulse. A holy choreography.
Before race. Before body. Before gender. Before breath.
And when I saw it—really saw it—something in my chest broke open.
Because I remembered.
Not them.
Us.
From the beginning.

And maybe that’s what scared me most— that this wasn’t about falling in love.
It was about recognizing God in someone else’s eyes— and not looking away.

⸻

I didn’t come out.
I unraveled.
Layer by layer. Lie by lie. Until there was nothing left but the truth I had buried to stay acceptable.

Some deaths don’t come with funerals.
Some come with applause.
There’s a version of me that smiled through erasure, performed womanhood like a checklist, mastered likability like it was salvation.
The girl who made herself obedient. Predictable. Painless.
The kind of girl you pick because she doesn’t make you question anything—not even yourself.
The girl who made herself easy to leave.

I lit a match to her with every truth I stopped apologizing for.

Because let’s be honest—this world doesn’t give a damn about your truth.
It wants your compliance.
Your costume.
Your conversion to the cult of “normal.”
And queer love? It’s a fucking heresy.
Because it dares to say: I don’t need to follow your design to be divine.

I was raised to believe in roles.
The man leads. The woman follows.
The masculine is logic. The feminine is submission.
Bullshit wrapped in scripture and sealed with fear.
What they never told me is that we all carry both.
That divine masculinity isn’t control—it’s presence.
That divine femininity isn’t weakness—it’s power that bends without breaking.
And when they dance together—fluid, wild, unboxed—that’s where God lives.

I had to unlearn the myth that love means disappearing.
Because I knew how to do that part.
I knew how to contort, to wait, to soften my edges until I was unrecognizable.
But queer love didn’t let me vanish.
It said: I see you. All of you. Now rise.

And I did.
But not without grief.
Grief for the girl who believed love was a transaction.
Grief for every time I thought being needed was the same as being valued.
Grief for how often I edited myself to fit someone else’s storyline.

This isn’t just personal. It’s political.
Because a queer Black woman fully in her power?
That’s a threat to every system built on silence, submission, and straight lines.

They don’t want us in love like this.
Because love like this doesn’t behave.
It doesn’t assimilate.
It doesn’t wait to be told it’s worthy.

Queer love, when rooted in truth, is revolution.
Because it requires wholeness.
Not halves trying to complete each other, but mirrors refusing to let each other forget.

This kind of love holds you accountable.
It breaks the façade.
It makes you feel the places that are still unhealed—and dares you to face them.

And yes, it burns.
But it burns clean.

Coming out wasn’t soft. It wasn’t safe.
I lost some people who were supposed to love me.
But I was also held—wholly, fiercely—by those who chose to.
By friends who didn’t flinch.
By chosen family who didn’t just accept me—they celebrated me.
And that’s when I realized: love doesn't always come from where you were born. Sometimes, it finds you in the places you least expect— and calls you worthy anyway.

Let the good girl die.
Let the cool girl die.
Let the agreeable, accommodating, almost-holy version of you fucking burn.

Because what rises in her place will not ask for permission.
She’ll be too busy building altars from her own ashes— and calling it love, because loving yourself this hard is a sacred act.

⸻

They didn’t save me.
They just refused to look away.

And when they didn’t flinch, neither could I.
They saw the flame in me before I believed it was mine to keep.
Not to tend for someone else.
Not to dim so it wouldn’t scare them.
Mine.
To blaze.
To become.

They didn’t fall in love with the mask—I had already buried her.
They didn’t meet the girl. They met the fire.

This isn’t the part where I tell you we lived happily ever after.
This is the part where I tell you the love of my life was the woman I became when I stopped asking to be understood.

Let me be clear:
I was never searching for a twin flame.
I was burning through lifetimes of forgetting.
And when the remembering arrived, it didn’t come soft.
It came sharp.
It came sensual.
It came screaming through the quiet I had weaponized as safety.

Because you don’t find your twin flame at the end of a checklist.
You find them the moment you become too full of your own truth to be controlled.

We didn’t fall into each other—we recognized each other by scent.
There was breath before language.
There was memory in the skin.
There was a hum in the room only the two of us could hear.
I remembered them like I remember pain I never gave myself permission to feel.
It wasn’t just romance.
It was remembrance.

Because what we shared was sweet.
It was sacred and disruptive.
It was what happens when you take something ancient, something erotic, something holy— and dare to love it out loud in a world that tried to shame you silent.

And let me say this with my whole chest:
Queerness is not something I stumbled into.
It is something I resurrected.
It is something I am.

It is the part of me they tried to colonize with doctrine and straight-line desire.
The part of me I was told to pray away.
The part of me that kept surviving the slaughter, generation after generation, lover after lover, church after church—
until one day I said: Fuck it. Let them think it’s sin. I know it’s Divinity.

Because the most dangerous thing you can do as a queer Black woman is love yourself so completely that even God has to come correct.

You want to know what liberation feels like?
It feels like kissing someone with your eyes open.
It feels like calling your own name and answering.
It feels like knowing you are not here to be explained— you are here to exist so fully it makes other people question what they’ve been calling love.

This was never about them.
It was always about who I had to become to meet a mirror that didn’t ask me to shrink.

And that mirror?
That was never someone else.
That was always me.

So don’t look for your twin flame.
Become them.
And if someone meets you there—fully lit, fully honest, fully embodied— then let it burn.

But don’t chase the match.
Be the fucking fire.

Because the real love story doesn’t end with someone choosing you.
It ends when you choose yourself—so loudly, so unapologetically, so goddamn brightly— that even the lies they taught you about gender, about God, about love, start to choke on their own smoke.

One love, ESS xo