I wrote before about lost friendships feeling like severed limbs. Well, I have since read evidence that when two people are together for so long, certain connections form in the brain that attaches those two people in a physical sense.  I suppose this is what creates the bond between parents and child and between long-term friends. Like symbiotic plants, this happens so effectively that no one notices … until you have to separate them. With plants you could barely do this without killing either one or both in the process. With people, separating can apparently be the same as amputating a limb. And I can now testify that when you split from a love so deep and so long, it feels as though each of your limbs is being severed … slowly … with a blunt instrument … and no painkillers.

So there’s Archangel Michael standing in his skimpy white shorts, with his long blonde locks and his huge … wings. He is standing with a large sword raised high. I stand in my mind’s eye opposite my husband with all our chakras connected by a spaghetti-junction of fine cords binding us to the point that neither of us knows where one ends and the other begins. My mind prompts the archangel to bring his sword down swiftly, wrapping the cords around the blade and flicking them away. The pain rips at my energy source and makes me want to throw up. I wrap the image of myself and my husband separately in soothing violet light to protect and heal. It is a visualisation that is taught to me, not to obliterate the pain but to speed up the amputation.

When practised over and over again, the process was complete in a month. The amputation was a success but I emerged from the operating theatre a few weeks ago, limbs in tact, heart replaced but bruised and energy restored and contained. But everything comes at a cost and I am still waiting to find out the cost of the amputation … did it come at the cost of a husband, a best friend, a lover …? or perhaps, and more hopefully, just that part of all three that had manifested itself into a tumour-like growth that we can both thrive without?

The joy of my gift will reveal itself over time. And, yes, there is a lot of joy. Just like a person can feel a sense of joy after losing someone they love, this does not mean they are happy about the loss but that there is a part of themselves that has been reawakened … there is a new beginning.

There are no happy endings, only joyful beginnings.