This story begins with a girl, crying in a church.

Except wait, no—that isn’t entirely accurate. For starters, that word, girl is a stretch, since she–I–was thirty-six at the time, long past the age where girl was appropriate in anything but a slangy sense. (Example: Girl, what are you thinking crying in this place of worship? Pull yourself together!)

Thirty-six was an age that terrified me, and not because I thought it was old, but because it was adjacent to thirty-seven, which was officially the late thirties, which were themselves adjacent to forty. And it wasn’t that forty in and of itself was scary. For years, I’d watched my pop culture big sisters turn forty—Halle Berry, Salma Hayek, Jennifers Aniston and Lopez—and they only grew more beautiful and powerful. I knew that forty was the new thirty, so different than it had been when my mom and her sisters celebrated with gravestone balloons and black buttercream, and so I wasn’t particularly afraid of the number. I was simply scared at the thought that I might arrive at forty having so very little to show.

I liked my work okay. I was a freelance campaign manager, working a series of political gigs dotted all across the country. It felt exciting and important and sometimes even glamorous, but it was just a day job to me, not my life’s great work. All of the work travel made the idea of a homebase more trouble than it was worth, so I didn’t have a house or even an apartment, choosing instead to haul my earthly possessions from city to city in a little white Corolla. And speaking of the Corolla, it was fourteen years old and fairly busted, with windows that rolled down but not up and a passenger side that only opened from the outside. I didn’t feel particularly comfortable in my body or confident in my looks. I had what one might consider a concerning amount of credit card debt. And I was single.

That last one–well, this may surprise you since we’re gearing up for a story about tracking down love on no fewer than five continents, but being single bothered me far less than the others. Most days, in fact, my singleness bothered me not at all.

I knew this was unusual. Even though I was firmly at the age where people had begun to pair off, nearly all of my friends at the time were single, and nearly all of them were applying themselves diligently to the task of becoming un-single. My friend Jeff had been on the dating apps for an impressive ten years, bringing to them the kind of resigned discipline that a person brings toward gym-going. (No one loves it. It’s sweaty and awkward and sometimes hurts the next day, but we just do it.) My friend Sarah, five years younger than I and with an apparently much more precise biological clock, filled entire phone calls with her anxieties of not having kissed enough men, slept with enough men, or found a husband. My friend Ashley had recently told me, over IPAs in a dark Denver bar, “I’m so lonely that sometimes I cry myself to sleep at night, wanting a partner.” I nodded in sympathy but stopped mid-nod when she sighed and added, “I know you feel the same.”

Because wait, did I? I’d wet the ol’ pillowcase plenty of times longing for things–spiritual connection, more purpose in my life–but a husband had never been one of them. I wanted to be married, sure, but in the way that I wanted to say, go on safari or to buy a beach house. I wanted those things vaguely. I wanted them eventually. I wanted them in a back of the vision board sort of way, when you’ve finished assembling all your primary wishes and then flip that sucker over to glue on a photo of the Taj Mahal or Dolly Parton in concert because well, as long as you were putting in an order, why not? But meeting a husband wasn’t a priority.

Work was a priority. Or—bigger than work—a calling was a priority. Since I could remember, I’d wanted to find a job that felt like more than a job. In college, as people around me happily settled on majors in physical therapy or teaching, I was still frantically searching for something that lit me up. That yearning for a calling felt encoded in my very DNA, and finding my life’s work felt as essential to me as growing eyelashes or toes. I wouldn’t be me without it, and so the idea of meeting a partner while I was still en utero, occupationally speaking, seemed absurd. So when my physical therapist and teacher friends moved onto the next stages of their lives, creating dating profiles and meeting exciting prospects, I told myself, “that’s not for you.”

Not that I was all alone all of those years. I might not have been walking toward the altar, but I also wasn’t exactly shuffling into the convent, if you know what I mean. I still had needs, not just for a pair of hot buns but for someone to marathon the Great British bakeoff with me on a rainy Sunday. I came up with what I came to think of as the Dorito Strategy.

It was accidental at first. Because I wasn’t being intentional about dating and had my energies focused elsewhere, I’d just sort of fall into things with men. Someone would choose me–usually at work, since I did little else–and I, being a little lonely and a little hungry, would shrug and say, “okay, fine.” I found myself dating unserious men, ones who either had no intentions of settling down, were completely wrong for me, or frequently, both. Some of these guys were perfectly kind to me, sweet goofballs who just hadn’t yet grown up, and some of them were frankly a little jerky. Either was acceptable to me.

My friend Sarah, after hearing me tell a story about a man who’d admitted he had a girlfriend only after I saw her name tattooed on his shoulder, shook her head and groaned in frustration. “Angela,” she said, “you deserve better than these men.”

“I know that,” I told her, equally as frustrated.  She wasn’t getting it. I wasn’t a victim, I was a strategist.

“Sarah, these men are like Doritos,” I said.

“Stale Doritos,” she said.

“Sure, stale Doritos,” I conceded. “And I would love a steak dinner someday. A filet mignon, maybe, with mashed potatoes. Brussels sprouts.”

“So go find a steak dinner,” she said.

“I’m not ready for the steak dinner,” I told her, and tried to explain.

I felt as though I was still in my sweatpants, metaphorically speaking. I had my glasses on, and my hair in a messy bun and I couldn’t just walk into a steakhouse looking like that. But sometimes a girl gets hungry. And when you find yourself ravenous at 3am, pilfering through the kitchen cabinets, and your hand lands on that bag of Cool Ranch from two weeks ago, you might think to yourself, “it’ll do.” The bonus, of course, was that it was hard to fall in love and accidentally marry a stale Dorito. So I continued to nibble, only as needed, while I searched for my calling.

And then I found it.

Sort of. Maybe.

I’d long since suspected that writing was probably a clue in finding my purpose. It had always been my best thing, since I was very young, and would have been the logical career for me except for the fact that, every time I sat down to write, I wanted to vomit. But I’d had a dangerously close brush with law school and had taken a trip across the world, forcing myself to sit down and write in romantic and beautiful places, and well, the details of that journey could fill a book–and had in fact, since I’d written one upon my return–but the summary is that I’d come home changed.

I’ll make this brief since I am, you’ll remember, still frozen mid sob in that church, but I do need to explain what writing–and stories themselves–had come to mean to me. As I was writing (and nearly vomiting) in all of those pretty cafes and parks and sunny studios, I felt something opening up for me that had previously been closed. All of my life I’d longed for magic and meaning, and I’d thought that finding the right job would deliver those things. But by throwing myself out into the world and peering very closely at it, nose to nose, I realized that the magic was lying out there all the time. It was though it was down deep in the grout of the world, and writing simply gave me a way to chip into it and free it all up.

And well, the stories, my god! I wrote about Portuguese nuns during the age of discovery and the poet Sappho and the anonymous Muslim artists who’d lit up the kingdom of Al Andalus with their colorful tiles. I spilled those stories out like a galaxy of stars and then added my own little bits to their constellations, and it was finally clear to me that all of it mattered an awful lot. I landed on a truth that many wiser, smarter people had already hit on: that a calling isn’t just a job. All of my life–all of every person’s life–is part of our callings, crammed with lessons to complete and adventures to have and people to learn from. I returned to my political work with fresh eyes, happy for the flexibility and the paycheck, and scrambled back to my writing whenever I could.

So maybe I did have something to show for myself at the frightening age of thirty-six.

But that was all internal. My externals were still mostly a mess. I didn’t know how to make writing into a paying job, or even if I was supposed to, and I didn’t know how much longer I could keep up the ol’ song and dance at my day job. (Which was also, unfortunately, also a night job and a weekend job.) I still had the geriatric Corolla, bless her valiant heart. I still had the debt, the nomadic life, and the lack of confidence in my body. And even if I had been ready, I wasn’t even convinced that the right man for me existed. My flings and flops had always left me feeling a little bored and uninspired. I’d rarely even encountered a male friend who seemed like someone I could see myself marrying. I’d never looked around at the perfectly nice husbands and boyfriends of my friends and thought, “If only I could find a nice man like Jeremy.” (No offense to Jeremy; I’m sure it was mutual.) All of this meant that a husband stayed firmly glued to the back of the vision board, a wish for another day.

But then, Texas happened.

This is when we return–finally–to the girl crying in the church.

Although much like the word girl, church could also be considered a stretch. Chapel might be a better fit, although even that feels a little off since I hadn’t exactly come there to like, pray or anything. It was more of a tourist opportunity. I’d been in Texas for months, zipping around the state in a rented Mazda while I worked on yet another political campaign, and now, with the gig over and a little time on my hands, I’d come to San Antonio to explore.

The chapel was inside of the Misión de Concepción, one of five missions built in the area by the Spanish Empire three hundred years ago. The Spaniards knew that converting the indigenous people to Catholicism was crucial to digging their claws deep into the frontier, so they built fortresses with churches and schools and farms tucked inside, and set about teaching Spanish and catechism and farming. I’d rambled around the outskirts of San Antonio all day, through the ruins of San Francisco de la Espada and San Juan Capistrano, and now I was sitting on a wooden pew in Concepción, the light from a single shaft of sunlight puddling around me. A giant iron chandelier hung over me, the sketch of a tiered cake lit up with electric candles, and the Blessed Virgin loomed over the altar in ochre and rose. She peered down at me with her arms open wide, but I didn’t return her gaze. I was staring at the screen of my cell phone, waiting for a text I knew wasn’t coming.

On the other end of the texts–or not, I suppose, who was to say–was a man named Azu. Azu was the handsome, dimpled, charismatic son of Nigerian immigrants who lived down the road in Houston. (“He’s a beefier Taye Diggs,” I’d texted to friend just after we’d met, and trust me when I say that both halves of that description were compliments.) I’d been seeing Azu for a few months and was in deep, though to be honest, I’d gone on our first date fully expecting another potato chip. I would feel guilty saying that but Azu later told me he’d pretty much expected the same, assuming I was an uptight political wonk obsessed with her career.

On our first date, we sat on a patio in Rice Village, under the drippy live oaks, ordered something called queso gringo, and look, while I’m pretty sure that dip was meant to be bland, our conversation was on fire. We started out by talking about the usual stuff–family and work and travel–but before long we were sailing fast into deeper territory, dreams and spiritual stuff and the restlessness we’d both felt forever. I mentioned a writer I liked, a Christian mystic I assumed no one else had read, and he actually knew her work. We talked about dating and he said–I kid you not–”it’s like I’ve been eating a lot of junk food, no steak dinners, you know?” I felt completely shaken, but in the happiest way, as though from the center of our table a confetti cannon had just exploded, the tiny bits of hot pink and turquoise and gold now swirling around us in the falling light.

Azu put it another way. “I feel like I’m peeling an onion with you,” he told me, his eyes lighting up and hands waving in front of him. “Just layer after layer after layer.”

I might not have been ready to meet someone all those years, but I’d certainly thought about it, and I knew that if it happened, it had to be something like this. I wanted a soulmate.

And oof, okay, now I’ve gone and used the s-word, a word I realize is loaded and divisive. For every lovely, aspirational mention of soulmate that you find in Greek theology and the Hindu scriptures and that other most sacred source, Lifetime Movies, you’ll find a dozen articles written by very smart and logical people telling you that to believe in soulmates is a very dangerous thing indeed. It’s immature and silly and may even doom you to suffer alone forever, waiting in some fairytale turret as you pass on each imperfect prince that rides below.

I won’t dive deep into soulmates here, since we have a couple hundred pages ahead of us and I’ve been sitting on that wooden pew for hours at this point, but I’ll only say for now that I wasn’t sixteen at the time of this story, I was thirty-six. I was spiritual and a seeker, and perhaps even a little woowoo, but also, I’d like to think, fairly smart and grounded. Could I quote from When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle? Sure, but I also knew lines from The Godfather and I wasn’t looking to join the mafia. I wasn’t hoping for a Hollywood ending or someone to complete me. I simply wanted someone to connect with me.

I’d spent so much of my life feeling a little weird, a little too deep and complicated for most people. Maybe this is just what everyone feels, in our own unique ways, like we’re each of us icebergs with most of our shadowy blue masses hovering far below the surface. Happy seals and polar bears and terns circle our tips and say things like, “oh, what a very nice little iceberg,” and we’re down there thinking, “well that’s me, sure, but not all of me.” That’s certainly how I’d felt, for really my entire life, and I liked the company of the seals and polar bears very much, but I often felt a little lonely. Only rarely did I feel a little poke at the deepest parts of me and look over to see that a narwhal had joined me on the seafloor. “I see you down here,” he’d say, “Nice ice.”

So on the subject of soulmates, I’ll only say that I hoped for a narwhal. And I didn’t know if Azu was my narwhal, but he was certainly able to swim awfully deep, brushing up against parts of me that had generally gone unbrushed. We talked until my throat was sore and my cheeks hurt from smiling and made plans to meet the next morning, to wander around the art museums of midtown. And then, Azu ghosted me.

I waited an embarrassingly long time to realize what was happening. We’d agreed to check in with each other in the morning to finalize our plans, but when I texted Azu, I didn’t hear back. First, I assumed he’d slept in. Maybe he’d been so wiped out by our date, so thoroughly inebriated by the conversation and the queso gringo that he’d slept right through his alarm. Then, I began to worry that something had happened to him. Maybe he’d left the restaurant, so enamored that his eyes turned into giant pulsing red hearts, and he’d had walked straight into traffic. A person doesn’t just not show up, I thought, especially one who’d been so excited and engaged the night prior. It was late afternoon before I finally gave up and went to the museum alone. I wandered around the Beninese copper heads and Egyptian coffins wiping tears from my eyes, the security guards regarding me with a mix of caution and confusion.

Then later that night, a text.

“Can I buy you dinner?” Azu wrote.

I found myself in completely unchartered territory. I’d never been ghosted, especially not after having been peeled like an onion down to my purply-pink center. (Not a euphemism!) I was still reeling from both the unfathomable connection and the baffling rejection, and also, I was just really, really curious. What was going on here?

I texted back.

“Okay.”

And for months, that was our pattern. We’d meet for an incredible night of conversation and fireworks and peeling the onion (euphemism!), and then Azu would pull away, disappearing for a few days or even a week.

“He’s just been through a lot,” I told my friend Ashley on the phone one night, lying in some hotel room in Dallas or Ft. Worth or Waco. During our good times, Azu and I had dug deep into our pasts, telling stories of old heartbreaks and family dynamics and the damage we each hauled around. I knew that his father had been exceptionally strict, even verbally abusive at times, and his mother had unloaded her own sadness onto a very young Azu. When he talked about her, I imagined him as a little boy, sitting in the corner of the bathroom while she removed her makeup, brushed her hair, told him how heartbroken she was. How could I be angry at that little boy?

“It’s understandable, I guess,” I said to Ashley, “We get so close and it scares him.”

“Ooh, yeah, he’s afraid,” Ashley answered, and god bless a thirty-something woman who’s read a few self-help books and is presented with a real live case study. We were both more than ready to play therapist. “He might just need some time to feel safe.”

Occasionally I’d get advice from a more cynical friend. “He’s just not that into you,” one said, which didn’t help, because first of all, didn’t they think I’d read that self-help book, too? And second, Azu clearly was into me, and that was the problem. The good times between us were so ridiculously good. We couldn’t stop laughing when we were together. We were swimming alone down on the ocean floor. One day, he wondered aloud what our kids would look like. One night, as he slept next to me, he let out a little fart and I actually enjoyed the scent, just that little bit of closeness with someone I liked so much.

As my campaign contract wrapped up, his absences grew longer and longer. We finally connected again, making a date to meet up at a suburban movie theater near my hotel, and he texted at the last minute to cancel. I ordered the Tour of Italy from an Olive Garden next door, returned to my hotel to eat my feelings and call Ashley.

“It might be time to give this one up,” she said, one of us no longer willing to play therapist. I nodded and sniffled, departing the island of Lasagna and moving onto the province of Chicken Parmigiana.

“You’re right,” I said. But then I went to San Antonio, thought of him, and gave it one more shot.

In the chapel at Concepcion, I stared down at my phone

I’m at the missions in San Antonio! I’d written hours earlier.

You’d love them!

They remind me of Spain!

I’d never been to Spain, but Azu had. He’d told me about it on our first date.

I stared at my phone, willing it to light up with a response from him. The cocktail of hope and anxiety that had run fast and hot through my veins all morning—and indeed, for months—settled into my chest into something heavier, more solid. Disappointment. Recognition. A final, very heavy no. It sent up a surge of tears that I didn’t even bother to wipe away, Mary being my only witness. This thing was over, I knew it was. I cried harder, picking up steam. I laid down the phone to press my hands into my face, letting myself know the truth. The girl and the church might have been less than accurate ways to describe the situation, but the crying was crying, and it was very, very real.

I was so swept up in the sadness that I completely forgot that what I was experiencing wasn’t just an ending, but a beginning. I’d had a glimmer of it, only weeks before.

Because life is complicated, and even those of us so smitten that we’re inhaling the farts of our beloveds have our moments of sanity, I wasn’t pining over Azu every minute of my time in Texas. Lots of the time, I was focused on my work, doing a pretty decent job and enjoying being so busy. Some of the time, I was making new friends and laughing with them over margaritas, happy for the respite. And in rare moments, usually out on I-10 or I-35 or one of the endless Is, soaring past fields of bluebonnets and longhorn cattle, I allowed myself to be a writer again, in spirit if not in practice. I let my mind wander to the next stories I might like to tell, the places I might travel to dig up some poetry. It was in those moments, talking to myself and the cows, that something began to take root in my brain.

I told Azu about it, late one night at a Mexican seafood restaurant after we’d both finished up work for the day. It was one of our good nights, and we were pressed together at a corner booth.

“I’m getting this idea,” I said. “For a book.”

“Yeah?” he asked.

He’d known about my writing since our first date. He knew that I’d written a book, but that it had really just felt like practice, not fit for publication. He knew that I wanted to keep going, and was excited for me to tell him more.

“I think I want to write about love,” I said, feeling the shaky little thrill of saying it out loud for the first time. “I want to travel and explore, maybe start looking for a partner.”

I didn’t say that last part to make him jealous. I knew that it wouldn’t. Despite the connection we had and despite the fact that he’d been the one to imagine our future children, I knew that he wasn’t looking for a commitment, not then.

“I can see it,” he said, his face illuminated, his tone playful, “a plucky young gal hunts for love.”

I laughed and rolled my eyes. I’d been thinking of something deeper.

In my first book, I’d written about my own search for a calling, but I’d tried to make it much bigger than that. My own story wasn’t that interesting. In fact, I was certain it was fairly universal, so many of us longing for more meaning in our work. So to counter its ordinariness, I’d set my own story against those of the Portuguese nuns and of Sappho the poet and of the Muslim artists. And in doing so, I learned that the world could teach you just about anything you needed to know, if you were willing to jump into it, maybe thrash around a little and wrestle with some big ideas. I came to realize that it really didn’t matter what question sent you out into the world in the first place–a search for a calling, a desire to find love–really the point of it all was to be out there exploring, growing, hopefully coming back a little bit better.

And well, though I hadn’t thought I was ready for it, I could feel a new question tugging at my sleeve, urging me to get back out into the world. Meeting a soulmate had stayed on the back of the vision board for so long, partly because I wasn’t sure there’d even been someone out there for me. But I’d sat underneath a live oak with Azu and he’d dropped something tiny and solid at the center of my chest: a poppyseed of possibility that had sprouted the tenderest wisp of a shoot over the last few months. I wasn’t quite ready to meet a partner. I was still in my sweatpants. But I was ready to get ready. I would take the long way and wind myself through as many cultures and stories and experiences as I could, growing and learning along the way.

What I didn’t tell Azu is that I had a suspicion how my story would end. Azu wasn’t the one now, but I’d get busy writing, and he, for his part, would probably set about diving into the deep psychological work that would make him a good partner for me. I would pull a TS Elliot, travel the world searching for love, and then, to paraphrase the poet, at the end of all of my exploring, I would arrive where I’d started, and know the Mexican restaurant in Houston for the first time.

“Sure,” I told Azu, “A plucky young gal hunts for love.”

In the chapel at Nuestra Senora de Concepcion, I was still crying, though trying to stop. A few tourists had wandered in, making their way up the center aisle, and I knew I needed to pull myself together. I jammed my phone into my back pocket, now certain that my texts to Azu would go unreturned, and rummaged around my purse for a Kleenex. Nothing. I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand and cursed the Texas heat for forcing me into short sleeves that morning. My nose was dangerously full and I attempted a few demure sniffles, eyes darting around the nave to make sure tourists weren’t looking. Finally, I gave up and breathed in one very loud, snotty sniffle, a sound so profound that it echoed through the entire church. A tourist turned to look at me. I could swear the Virgin over the altar winced, closing her arms a couple of inches. It was time to go.

I stepped out into the blazing San Antonio sun and let it dry my face. And then suddenly it happened. There were words in my head.

This story starts with a girl crying in a church.

I remembered my idea for the book about love. And as I did, my very narrow focus–Azu! Heartbreak! Rejection!–began to expand outward, letting in a little light. I felt a flicker of hope, remembering that, well, if I wrote a whole gigantic, sprawling book about love, this sad little moment would shrink down to become but a chapter. There were dozens more chapters to come, and surely some of them would be sunnier. This story would have a happy ending, if for no other reason than the fact that I was in charge of it. I’d keep writing until I was happy.

I had no idea, standing before the church in San Antonio, how long the story would stretch out. I couldn’t have known just how many times I’d cry, not just in churches but in hotel bathtubs and camper vans, on park benches and piazzas, on buses and airplanes and once, over french fries at a double decker McDonalds in Athens, Greece.  I couldn’t have known, either, how mystical it would all become, taking me through the cosmos and to healers and psychics and serving up so many bits of magic that it would shape my entire belief system. I had no idea how much I’d grow and change, or that I’d abandon the story half a dozen times and pick it back up just as many. I couldn’t have predicted that the next time I returned to Concepción, so many years later, I’d be fluent in Spanish, and it wouldn’t be lost on me that the word means conception, the beginning of something big.

I only knew, that day in Texas, that a new story, and its opening sentence had landed in my head like a bluebird. I gathered up my bruised and battered heart, took a deep breath, and shuffled off to the rental car to find a Kleenex and a pen.