In late February of 2015, if you’d looked to the eastern horizon just after dusk, you would have seen two exceptionally bright points of light inching toward one another, like leads in a play on the cusp of a kiss. Entering from the left was tiny Mars, who seemed to almost drag himself across the sky, a wary hero in a hesitant crawl. Blazing upward from the treetops was Venus, brazen and willing, a starlet in a silvery sequined dress. Night after night, they completed their choreography against a starry set, and on the night of February 22, despite the differences in speed and direction, the two came together in a cosmic embrace.

I missed the event because I was caught up in my own romantic drama, obsessing over a soulmate I was certain was too good for me.

I met Amir just after Valentine’s Day, on a trip to Barcelona, using a dating site profile that I’d created strictly for fun. At the time, I wanted a relationship very much, but I wasn’t ready to meet anyone incredible. A few intense years of working on the road had done their damage on me. My life felt a bit unsettled, my finances chaotic, but most importantly, I felt uncomfortable in my body, heavier than I felt comfortable being. I decided that fixing these things were prerequisites for dating, and so I continued wanting a relationship in a someday kind of way.

Still, I’d been in Barcelona alone for two weeks and had grown lonely and restless. I’d walked a hundred windy miles through the gothic quarter and stood in the orange pools of light at Sagrada Familia. I’d marveled at the wild green parakeets and the chilly sea and, inevitably, almost nightly, I’d peek into some warmly lit cafe or bar and feel a pang of jealousy at all of those locals huddled together, laughing and chatting. One night, back home alone in my painfully quiet rental, I had a brilliant idea: I would create a dating profile, go on a few dates, and write about it. Like a game, I thought. Almost a joke.

I’d never done online dating–wouldn’t have even considered it in my normal life–but I knew that the chief rule was that you could not misrepresent yourself. Writing up a witty profile (in English) was easy, but I labored over selecting photos. I was terrified to disappoint anyone, to show up at a bar and see my date’s face fall, and so I chose carefully. I picked several headshots, in varying levels of cuteness. Then I pored over my options to land on the right full length photo: a selfie I’d taken in a white jacket and jeans in the dressing room of a TJ Maxx. 

To my surprise, online dating was mildly pleasant. Fun, even. I had several nice online chats with men, which was at least something to fill my evenings with. I went on a very boring date with a brilliant Italian man, a professor of something that I really can’t recall. I went on a very sweet date with an earnest young Spaniard, a dinner by the beach where we talked about his broken heart over squid ink paella. On my last full day in Spain, satisfied with my experiment, I logged onto the dating site to delete my profile. And there he was.

“How’s the weather?” Amir had messaged, a silly response to the fact that I’d written in my profile that I didn’t like small talk. I smiled and laughed and, without thinking about plane rides or readiness, immediately wrote back. When I clicked over to read his profile, I felt a little flutter in my chest, a feeling of something I can only call recognition. I liked so much of what I saw: his thoughtful responses to questions, his silly Anchorman references, his profile photo that was handsome but not ridiculously so. But I  was a bit intimidated, too. He spoke 5 languages and had an MBA from a good American school. He was an expat in a chic seaside town south of Barcelona and seemed so worldly and exotic in a way that I wasn’t. It was scrolling through his photos, though, that immediately dashed any burgeoning hopes. Here was the clincher, the thing that would surely doom our relationship before it began: he appeared to be very, very into yoga.

It wasn’t that I disliked  yoga or the people who practiced it. Quite the opposite. To me, yogis were nearly perfect. They were thin and lithe, both bendy and strong, a subspecies of human who prowled among us in Lululemon gear and never touched a donut. I, in turn, was neither thin nor lithe, neither bendy nor particularly strong, and I would have been nibbling on a donut at that very moment had there been one in my Barcelona rental. In my mind, there were those who did yoga and there were people like me, and never the twain shall swipe right and meet for a beer. 

But, miraculously, we had connected, and by the time I’d poured myself a second cup of coffee, Amir had responded to my message, and we were off and running.  We messaged as I finished my breakfast, as I dried my hair, as I dressed and forced myself away from my computer to enjoy my last day in the city. He was hilarious–and our senses of humor  just matched up in a way that made me feel hilarious–but he also seemed very smart and kind and  just generally intriguing to me in a way that few men were. After a very distracted walk through Barcelona, I rushed home to chuck my souvenirs in a suitcase and continue our conversation. The messages flew back and forth and my chest grew warm and for a second, I thought, should we just go for it? Should we grab a drink tonight before I fly home tomorrow? But it was late and he was a train ride down the coast, and anyway, I wasn’t ready. 

“Don’t worry, I’ll be back in Barcelona soon,” I told him, with absolutely no plans of being back in Barcelona soon. I didn’t add: When I’m better. When I’m thinner. When I’m bilingual and fit and worthy of someone like you.

***

When two bodies come together, we have what astronomers call a conjunction.

The entities can be the sun and the moon, say, or two planets, and the union is purely an optical illusion. Saturn and Mercury, for example, are 850 million miles apart  and will obviously never touch.

 Astrologers use the term conjunction, too, but for them, the meetup is more than just a visual trick. Each planet in the solar system represents a certain set of qualities, and so astrologically, a conjunction means a very real blending of two energies. Saturn, for example, symbolizes discipline. Mercury represents mental acuity. So when the two are in conjunction, they might create favorable conditions for us to write an essay or do our taxes. 

Conjunctions are not exceptionally rare. In a sky crowded with planets and moons and asteroids, there are bound to be dozens of them in any given year. But 2015 was unique in that two planets, Mars and Venus, met three separate times in the sky. Astronomically, these conjunctions were lovely events to witness, two of our brightest points of lights lining up overhead. Astrologically, though, they were epic. Mars is fiery, fierce and masculine. Venus is romantic, sensual, feminine. The two deities are the lovers of the zodiac, cosmic soulmates. The implication of their three-part rendezvous was clear: it would be a year of love and romance, of fated pairings finally coming to fruition. 

*** 

“Does this mean that we’re gods?” Amir asked me, when I told him about the Mars-Venus conjunction. 

By that time, I’d flown back to the US and our conversation had only deepened. We moved from dating app DMs to endless google chats that made my face hurt from all of the smiling. He sent me songs and clips of silly movies and once, on a video call, he told me I had exotic eyes. I sent him emails throughout the day, but my favorite was the one I’d write after the sun had set in Texas, knowing he was already fast asleep by the sea in Spain. I labored over that evening letter like a baker working the late shift, wrapping my words around themselves like a cinnamon roll, something sweet and warm that he could have with his morning coffee.

“Yes, we might be gods,” I told Amir, laughing. 

I wasn’t sure I believed in astrology–maybe 55 percent, I liked to joke–but I’d read about the Mars-Venus conjunctions on an astrologer’s website and I certainly liked the implication. I’d never before met anyone like Amir, who felt so familiar and compelling and like home to me. Meeting him felt at once impossible and fated, and it didn’t seem like such a stretch  that the same wild force that pulled those two planets together in the sky could have pulled me to Barcelona and into his orbit. When I looked up the dates of the Mars-Venus meetups that year, my belief in astrology rose to 70 percent, maybe 75: the first conjunction was February 22, the week that Amir had sent his first hello.

For every moment of elation and faith, though, there was one of piercing insecurity. Amir would occasionally mention going to yoga class and I would immediately imagine him surrounded by a pantheon of thin and beautiful yoga goddesses, shapeshifting effortlessly from pigeons to serpents to silvery dolphins. I googled him and found pictures of a yoga retreat, Amir laughing and eating macrobiotic food alongside thin and beautiful women who could almost certainly do the splits. Once, he told me he’d spent the day doing a modeling shoot as a favor for his yoga teacher, and when I pored over the photos he shared, my heart sank. His body was so perfect and sinewy, a damn yoga god. 

A strange thing is that, despite my insecurity over the yoga, I actually did quite like myself. I knew that I was smart and funny and pretty enough, and I was even able to see that I excelled in areas where Amir did not. He told me how anxious and awkward he felt with groups, and I was completely at ease speaking in front of one. He was intelligent, sure, but in a logical, analytical way, whereas I was the passionate and creative one over here twisting words into breakfast pastries. And yes, he lived in a beautiful seaside village just a train ride from Barcelona, but he was a homebody, happy to stay put. Wasn’t I the one who’d flown there to write and explore and have patatas bravas with boring Italian men? I knew I was adventurous and brave in a way that he wasn’t.

But it seemed to me that there was a hierarchy of positive traits, and a perfect body trumped all. Not once had I heard a man say, disappointed, “she wasn’t as creative as she looked in her profile pictures.” Not once had I heard, “her public speaking skills are hot as hell.”

***

We have always been a little obsessed with Mars.

Even when our universe was smaller and we looked up at the night sky without telescopes, Mars was impossible to miss. The iron oxide in the planet’s crust gives it a dusty red color and its proximity to earth means it outshines most of its cohort. Mars is a standout and a stunner, and more often than not, we’ve named the planet after a passionate god of war. The Sumerians called it Nergal, the god of the underworld who emerged occasionally to bring death and destruction to his enemies. The Indians called the planet Mangala, a flame-colored god who was armed with a spear, a mace and a trident atop his trusty ram. And to the Greeks, of course, the planet was named after Ares, a warrior to the core.

When the Romans adopted Greek astrology, the planet Ares became Mars, but the translation wasn’t exact. The Greek god Ares was, quite frankly, kind of a jerk. He was bloodthirsty, brutish, and always looking for a fight. His closest companions were his two sons, whom he named Phobos and Deimos, AKA Fear and Dread. Even his parents didn’t like him much, and the Greek people followed suit. They never worshiped Ares, never called on him for assistance. They only ever regarded him with uneasiness and contempt.

Mars, on the other hand, was beloved. He was a god of war too, but for him, military power was a means to secure stability and peace. His very origins may have been sweet and gentle: in one version of his birth story, he was conceived when a magical flower was placed against the belly of his mother, Juno. Since he had plant blood literally running through his veins, he was perfectly suited to moonlight as the god of agriculture, protecting the vital crops from the encroaching wild. The Romans grew to see Mars as sort of a nurturer and a father figure, a loving guardian who would always keep them safe. To them, Mars was the perfect, idealized man.

***

Amir and I met in person before I was ready, which is a funny thing to say because the meeting was my idea.

It was late April, and we’d been communicating for two months. I wanted to feel more ready before I met him–to lose more weight, be fitter, have my life figured out–but we were both falling for each other at a dangerous rate, considering we’d never actually met. It seemed like the only thing crazier than my hopping on a flight back to Barcelona would have been staying put, and so I cracked open my laptop and searched for flights.

He’s seen your photos, I reminded myself as I steeled my courage and bought a ticket to Spain. 

Lots of handsome men have found you to be beautiful, I told myself as I nervously packed a suitcase.

And also, always, this thing is written in the stars.

***

It’s a strange thing, to fall for someone you’ve only seen on a computer screen, from the waist up. Left with a one-dimensional image, you chisel out the sculpture with your imagination: the splay of his fingers around a pint glass, the curvature of his cheeks, his scent. It’s disorienting when the human being before you doesn’t match the one you’ve sculpted, and initially, that was true for me with Amir.

I’d booked a place halfway between Barcelona-Prat Airport and Amir’s little seaside town, a pretty little hotel with a hallway of windows overlooking the street below. As I headed downstairs for our first meeting, I saw a tall, thin man walking toward the lobby. Amir. He was…different than I’d expected. A little too thin? A little awkward in his gait? Later, when we’d settled into a patio bar under a tangle of aleppo pines, I squinted at him across the table and found his arms to be strangely short. Pterodactyl-ish. 

Give it time, I told myself, remembering all of those weeks of conversation and connection. This man had felt like a soulmate. A kindred spirit! Did I really care about the proportions of his forearms? What we had found deserved every chance in the world. 

“What should we do next?” I asked him an hour or so later, after we’d finished our beers and warmed a little to each other. 

“Oh, gosh,” he said, looking down at his hands, “I’m just…I don’t know…I’m just so beat.” 

We made a plan to meet the next day and hugged goodnight, and I walked back to my hotel with a pebble of dread in the bottom of my gut. 

The following day, I paid sixty euros for a taxi ride along the twisty seaside cliffs to Amir’s town, checked into a second pretty little hotel, and went to Amir’s to watch a movie. He’d thought it was insane that I’d never seen Talladega Nights, and I thought it was charming that this brilliant man loved such silly movies, and we settled in on the couch. Amir put his arm around my shoulder as we watched, and when I turned to chat with him after the film had ended, he reached up to brush a strand of hair away from my face. “You do have the prettiest eyes,” he told me, his brow knitted, eyes searching my face. 

He went to the kitchen to get us glasses of water, and he was reaching up to open a cabinet, turning to say something to me, when it happened. 

Oh, I thought. Oh, there it is.

I could suddenly see it: that he was handsome, that I did want this, that it was, quite possibly, still very much meant to be. I felt it in my chest like a tiny green shoot, a tendril of possibility.

Sometimes it just takes a little time.

Amir did not agree. We spent two more days together–climbing the hill to the little church in town, sitting on a bench by the sea as a swan came in for a landing–but it didn’t matter. I felt something growing in me, a sense of physical attraction to match the wild mental one we already had, but Amir had made up his mind on the night we’d first met. He’d believed I was beautiful on a computer screen, had liked the sculpture he’d chiseled out of me. He’d laughed with me for hours and shared stories and plans, had wondered aloud what it might be like to be together.  And then, he had taken one look at me in person and said “no thanks, I’ll pass.” 

What conclusion was I to draw from this, other than the obvious one? What could I blame, except for my body?

When we said goodbye outside of my hotel, I rested my hands on his slender hips and kept my eyes on the sidewalk for a minute, conjuring a little courage. “I want you to know,” I said, “I’m working on losing weight. It’s important to me.” 

I had to say it. I hated myself for saying it. It was true and it shouldn’t have mattered and it did. 

He looked away, swallowed. He was searching for a consolation prize, anything to make me feel better about the whole messy ordeal. After a minute he said, “You said that Mars and Venus won’t meet up again until the fall, right? That it’s not time yet anyway?” 

It was a regift, really. Amir didn’t actually believe in astrology, had only ever listened good-naturedly when I talked about the conjunctions. He had taken my own little bit of magic, rewrapped it in a shiny layer of false hope and handed it back to me. It was a present meant only to placate me, but I hugged it to my chest as though it were a box of rubies. Thank you! You’re right! This thing between us is still meant to be.

***

Venus’ story is one of constant transformation, starting with the fact that once, she wasn’t Venus at all.

Four thousand years ago, in what’s now Iraq, Babylonian astronomers created the first functional theory of planets. They observed that while most of the stars in the night sky stayed put, there were five that seemed to move across the darkness. They called these bibbu, a word usually translated as wild sheep, since they were wayward little creatures that had wandered away from the celestial herd.

The brightest of the wild sheep they named Inanna, after their goddess of love, and they discovered she had the most curious path of all. For about nine months, she appeared on the eastern horizon just before dawn. Then,for several weeks, she disappeared completely, only to reemerge before sunset in the western sky. Now we know that the planet, our Venus, hasn’t gone anywhere and is simply passing before the sun or dipping behind it. The Babylonians, though, believed that Inanna had journeyed deep into the underworld. No other deity could descend into the depths and return, but Inanna was special: she regularly fell down into the darkness, was stripped of her vestments, and then was reborn whole. 

The Greeks would later call  the wild sheep the astra planeta, the wandering stars, and they renamed Inanna Aphrodite after their own goddess of beauty and passion. Under the Romans, of course, Aphrodite became Venus, another goddess of love, and almost two thousand years later, she would come to enchant an astronomer in Florence named Galileo Galilei. 

At the time, Copernicus’ theory–that the sun was the center of the solar system– was just a theory. Without a tool that would’ve allowed him to crack open the universe, Copernicus had been confined to his own mind: he’d formulated his hypothesis by thinking a lot, reading a lot, and doing an impressive amount of math. But in 1608, the telescope was invented, and Galileo rushed to build his own. Finally, the planets could be known, not just as pinpricks of light in the sky but as bodies that danced and spun. Galileo saw the craggy surface of the moon and discovered that Jupiter had its own satellites, and then he zeroed in on Venus. He realized that she had phases, just like our moon, and he watched as she grew heavy and round with light and then emptied out once again. He knew that this could only be so if she orbited the sun, and so finally, there it was: the proof that Copernicus had never had. Venus’ transformation, it turned out, unlocked the truth of our entire solar system.

Hundreds of years later, when we could see Venus in even finer detail, we learned that much of her surface is formed by volcanoes, her core continually rising to reshape her crust.  

***

Back in Texas, I threw myself into a summer of self-improvement. I rented a tiny house in Austin, a home base after years of nomadic life. I bought bags of healthy groceries and a set of weights, but also books about self-worth and a stack of blank journals. I wanted to lose some weight and feel more comfortable in my skin, but I also knew the truth: I needed to become the kind of woman who didn’t immediately place a man on a pedestal simply because of his yoga body. 

By the fall, after a little break in communication, Amir and I had settled back into a nice penpalship. We messaged regularly and chatted occasionally and never spoke about all the messy things that lay behind us. Sometimes, in the hot Autumn nights that refused to mellow, I was awoken by an unresolved rage: I’d deserved every chance in the world and he’d given me exactly one. Sometimes, walking laps around the lake nearby or sitting under the leafy oaks in my yard, I felt very calm about the whole ordeal. You can’t help who you’re attracted to and anyway, hadn’t I felt unhappy with my body, too? One night, lying in bed, I reached down to press a fist to each hip bone and felt a wave of what I can only call grief. I’d lost thirty pounds, in a way that actually felt gentle and healthy and good, but the wideness of my hips was bone. It wasn't even possible, I thought, to become the slender yoga goddess Amir must have wanted. How could fate have gotten it so wrong?

The second and third Mars-Venus conjunctions came in September and November without incident, but in the year that followed, I’d swear there were still forces trying to push the two of us together. I made a trip to Paris and a strange twist landed me in Barcelona, where I met Amir for dinner and a walk along the beach. There were strange dreams and improbable coincidences, things that I can’t explain even now. At first I welcomed it all–this cosmic magic that seemingly wasn’t giving up on us–but I began to feel frustrated and impatient. I’d lost sixty pounds and had seen Amir again and he still hadn’t found me attractive. I’d dated new men and started a new job and had seen a therapist to ensure my mental soundness, and still the strange connection persisted. Amir was open–he liked our connection, even if he didn’t see it as romantic–but I felt in equal parts crazy and gifted, privy to some force of the universe that he couldn’t see. It seemed that, for some reason, this thing simply wouldn’t let me go.

Nearly two years after we’d first met, I flew to Portugal for a writing project and swore that I would not be going to Spain on that trip, no matter what kind of hijinks fate wanted to pull. But in London, when I scanned my boarding pass for the connecting flight to Lisbon, an angry beeping sound ensued and an agent was sent out to find a solution. Ten minutes later, I found myself with a ticket to Madrid, and I shrugged, surrendered, and headed to Spain once more.

***

We’ve been wrong about Mars before.

In the late 1800s, Giovanni Schiaparelli, an astronomer in Milan, set out to create the first detailed map of the surface of Mars. He claimed that he saw continents and seas and a web of linear structures that he called canali.  Canali is Italian for “channels,” a sort of generic word for any groove in the soil, human-made or otherwise. On this side of the Atlantic, though, we translated the word as canal, an artificial passage that had to have been dug. A few American astronomers speculated that Martians had created the canals to irrigate their planet.

If this were true, it meant that not only was there life on Mars, but that it was magnificent. The LA Times ran a front-page article stating that the story of the Martian people was one of the greatest survival stories ever told. Because there were no longer lakes or rivers on Mars, the Martians had  constructed these inconceivably long canals to direct water from their icy poles to their barren farms, sometimes even making the water run uphill.  According to the Times, scientists hypothesized that the canal builders were giants, capable of throwing two and a half tons of dirt over their shoulders with each swing of the shovel. “A Martian can run a hundred yards in three or four seconds,” it said, “and kick a football a quarter of a mile.” The Martians were smarter than us, stronger than us, far more resilient than we could ever hope to be.  They were, in every conceivable way, better than we were. 

Not long after, a Greek-French astronomer named Eugène Antoniadi studied the canali through an exceptionally powerful telescope called the Grande Lunette. As the giant refractor gathered and focused the light, Antoniadi saw the once-linear canali melt into a random mess of spots and blotches. They weren’t canals. They weren’t even channels. They were only ever illusions, born of blurry vision, hope and insecurity. 

***

I didn’t know why I was in Madrid. It was February, a drizzly week, and the gray of the city was made worse by the fact that my hotel points only allowed for a stay in the northern suburbs. I let Amir know that I was in Spain–a silly selfie outside the stadium of Real Madrid–but we never progressed past a few daily messages. I took long, damp walks into the city center, wandering through the golden triangle of art to find our doppelgangers in museums: his, a lanky Greek poet in the Thyssen, mine, a fleshy blonde goddess in the Prado. I texted the poet to Amir but promptly deleted the goddess because who was I kidding?

One night, lonely in my hotel room and googling around for some bit of brightness, I stumbled upon an online course by an astrologer I sometimes followed. She’d been the source of most of my Mars-Venus  information two years prior, but somehow I had missed news of this class, an online series held during the conjunctions. The course had been recorded and was still available, so I clicked on the description to learn more. 

“While it’s natural to focus on relationships with others,” I read, “the deeper meaning of the interactions of these two planets is actually the Holy Inner Union.”

Well, huh, I thought. 

I had no idea what that meant. It certainly sounded far less sexy than what I’d once hoped the conjunctions were delivering me, some kind of fleshy, outer union. But there I was, sitting alone in a foreign hotel room, spent from a day consoling myself with paintings of Greek poets, wondering why destiny seemed to be screwing with me again and again. The outer union was not forthcoming. The forces of fate were not letting up. I pulled out my credit card and downloaded the course. 

The astrologer, dressed in peacock blue and perched atop a zebra print chair, spoke in a cheery, approachable tone. She said that in the same way that Mars and Venus had been meeting up in the sky, there was an opportunity for the energies of both planets to come together within each of us.  All of the best parts of Mars (his fire, his strength, his power) and all of the best parts of Venus (her sexiness, her passion, her power) already existed inside of us. Our work was to realize that we’re already whole, lacking nothing.

 If we failed to do that, she cautioned,  we would forever be projecting the disowned aspects of ourselves onto other people. Often, she said, the things we like about others, even idolize, are simply parts of ourselves we haven’t yet developed.

How lovely, I thought, warmed by the laptop glow that night in Madrid. How profound. And then, immediately after: How could this possibly apply to me?

The teacher had appeared but the student was busy deleting photos of goddesses from her phone. 

The next morning I took a train to Cordoba, then Granada, then Seville. Amir never brought up meeting and I wasn’t going to force it, so I circled back to Madrid and booked a flight home, confused as to why I’d ever come.

***

A curious thing about Mars and Venus is that they were never actually married. 

In our pop psychology books and western astrology, we love to pair these two up as the perfect, sexy rom-com couple, an exclusive item. But Mars actually had a consort named Nerio and Venus was essentially forced into an arranged marriage to a blacksmithing god named Vulcan. Vulcan was old and impotent and generally no fun, and Venus–well she didn’t become known as the goddess of desire for nothing, you know? She was vibrant and powerful, and when she saw Mars striding by in his battle chaps, she thought, “I could go for a little of that.” 

The Romans loved a hot celebrity couple as much as we do, and they couldn’t resist depicting Mars and Venus together. By looking at the temples and friezes of ancient Rome, you’d have thought that Venus left Vulcan and spent the rest of her life devoted to Mars, but the truth was, Venus played the field. She had a fling with the Trojan prince Anchises, and their descendents would go on to found the city of Rome. She had a good time with Bacchus, a fling with Zeus, and even spent time with a few goddesses. If she had what we’d call a soulmate, it wasn’t Mars at all, but the impossibly handsome Adonis, a mortal hunter who was killed by a boar after Venus warned him of that very thing.

Moreover, Venus was always more than just her love life. She got stuff done. She coaxed the crops up from the sleepy soil and fed an empire. She guarded over lovers and prostitutes, over luck and fertility. She could purify springs for drinking and calm the seas for sailing, and when the Romans–her favorite people–asked for her help in the battle against Carthage, she did not let them down. She secured the victory and saved the city state. 

All of this to say, in the story of Venus, Mars is barely a footnote.

***

I wasn’t thinking of Amir the first time that I walked into a yoga studio. I wasn’t hoping to develop a perfect, sinewy yoga figure or to embody the things I’d once projected onto another. I was just deeply, terribly sad and needed a way not to be. 

By then, it had been two years since I’d downloaded the astrologer’s class in the Madrid hotel room. Amir and I were in sporadic touch, really more acquaintances than friends. I’d had some big career wins and done some exciting traveling and, while I’d yet to meet anyone else that felt like a soulmate, I’d dated plenty of men and had generally moved on and couldn’t say that I missed Amir, not really.

What I did miss was the magic. I missed the wild forces that had once seemed to be pushing us together. I missed the rerouted plane trips and the weird coincidences and the belief in a cosmic order, which I hadn’t seen evidence of in a painfully long time. I felt dejected and disenchanted and when I found myself in a cloudy, dreary February with too much time on my hands, I signed up for a beginner’s yoga class.

My first class was led by the most gorgeous, chiseled former pro basketball player, a man so generous and welcoming that I didn’t even think to be intimidated. There were two other students in the class and we mostly spent the time doing simple poses and learning about form. At one point, we were crouched in low lunges, both knees on the ground, and the teacher told us to rise to standing, simply using the strength of our thighs. I wobbled and stalled out and had to place my hands on the floor for leverage, but I surprised myself by not caring much. “I’ll get there,” I figured. “There’s time.”

I went to every beginner’s class that the studio offered. I found myself wobbling less and less in the balancing poses. I stopped needing to drop to my knees halfway through a plank. I bought a fancier mat and special towels. I found myself giggling in class for no reason, just so happy to be there moving and bending, and once a favorite teacher told me that she often caught me beaming.

The process was not without its low points. Once, during a Sunday morning beginner’s class that had somehow filled up with experienced students, the teacher went rogue. She pushed us to go faster and harder than I was used to, calling out to me by name as I struggled and stumbled. I felt not unlike the way I had in grade school PE class, so much slower and clumsier than the group, and I was mortified to find that I was crying. Once, I looked back through my legs during downward dog and cringed at the sight of my butt in the mirror, still so much wider than everyone else’s. I detested my butt for the trouble it had caused me. I’d met a soulmate and had been too big for him, had lost sixty pounds and it still wasn’t enough. “This is why Amir didn’t want me,” I thought, shocked that I still cared.

These moments hurt me in a way that was nearly physical, but because I was stuck in a small room and pinned in by bodies, I had no choice but to keep moving through the poses. I learned that when I did, whatever awful thing had risen up would inevitably lose its intensity, tossed about with each bend and twist and stretch. It was as though yoga was trawling my  soft tissue for sharp, buried things–the cruelest thoughts, the most cutting memories–but in the same movement, it was smoothing and softening everything it brought to the surface, leaving a rainbow of bright seaglass flashing in the light. I regularly lay in savasana, the resting pose at the end of class, and felt the deepest, simplest joy come over me.

I couldn’t believe it was actually working.

***

You may already know that Venus was born whole.

The Birth of Venus, the painting by Boticelli, is among the most famous in the world and most of us recognize the image: a pale, naked Venus rides a seashell across the waves to Cyprus, having just emerged from the seafoam fully formed. Maybe even more famous is the Venus De Milo, who’s visited by seven million people each year. She was found buried in pieces on a Greek island farm, but within two years was reassembled and standing in the light of the Louvre. She glows in nearly seven feet of a stone called Parian marble, a translucent marble that is completely without flaw. 

Perhaps lesser known is that Shakespeare’s first published work was a poem about Venus, a retelling of the myth about her love for Adonis. In Ovid’s version, Venus is enamored, but she never loses her sense of self. She gives up the heavens to traipse through the woods with Adonis on his hunts, but he’s just as devoted to her. When they snuggle up in the shade after their treks, she’s the one doing the talking. Adonis listens, enraptured, as she tells him of the triumphs she’s had and the tricks she’s pulled and the insider information few mortals get to know. She warns him of hunting beasts that can charge back at him–”Stick to the rabbits,” she says–and though he doubts her, she is resolute. Adonis may be gorgeous but Venus is the goddess. She knows she’s privy to forces of the universe that he can’t see. 

Shakespeare, though, turns Venus into a joke. She’s shameless, perverted, and desperate. She sees Adonis out hunting and immediately becomes obsessed with him, telling him he’s three times as pretty as she is. Even though he’s pouty and immature and has zero interest in anything besides hunting, Venus throws herself at him. (Quite literally, she plucks him from the horse he’s riding and pins him to the ground.) She spends a few dozen stanzas begging him for a kiss, and when Adonis smiles condescendingly at her efforts, she falls in love with his dimples. When she has her prophecy, that Adonis will be killed by a boar on the next day’s hunt, she immediately doubts herself, admitting that jealousy makes us paranoid. He ignores her of course. He shames her and rejects her once more, and she’s still sad when he dies.

I read the poem and got as fired up as a person can get reading Shakespeare. Are you serious? I thought. Here was the most enchanting of all the goddesses, she who birthed a city state and could change the winds of fortune with a sigh. We’re supposed to believe that this gorgeous, divine specimen would throw herself after a mortal manchild? Ridiculous! This was a goddess who didn’t need an eighty-nine dollar internet course to tell her not to idolize men. She’d been perfect since the day she first stepped from the sea.

***

In Valencia, Spain, I met a true yoga goddess. 

I’d gone to the city to attend a Spanish language school, an extension of the self-study I’d been doing for nearly a year. Just like  yoga, multilingualism was something I’d idolized in Amir, and just like with yoga, I’d wandered into learning Spanish without consciously thinking of him at all. 

For years, I’d vaguely wanted to be bilingual, but sometime after my drizzly trip to Madrid, something had exploded inside of me and I suddenly couldn’t bear to live without Spanish for one second more. I cut a rainbow of index cards into fourths and made hundreds of flashcards, stashing them in a ziplock baggie and carrying them with me everywhere I went. I whispered those words in my Austin tiny house, in hotel bathtubs after long days of work, on a dozen airplanes. 

One night, playing around on a language app, I stumbled upon a run of Spanish adverbs. They were the most utilitarian of words, fairly basic and not exactly meant to be poetic, but I felt a sense of delight growing in me as I recited them. Lentamente, slowly. Bellamente, beautifully. Frecuentemente, frequently. They just kept coming, each one bouncing on my tongue like a colorful, effervescent bubble, tickling as they slid down my throat and settled into my solar plexus. I found myself grinning, then giggling, the same way I had in those early yoga classes. Permanentemente, afortunadamente –and, are you kidding me?–inteligentemente! How had I ever lived without this language, these words, this lightness in my chest?

When I had a little time to devote to immersive learning, I knew I wanted to return to Spain. I bypassed schools in Barcelona (still Amir’s city) and Madrid (too many sad memories) and settled on Valencia, a sunny little gem perched on the Mediterranean coast. I was just a couple months into my yoga practice and couldn’t imagine pausing, so I found a little studio in the neighborhood of Rusafa and bought a block of classes.  There were no beginner’s classes offered, and none in English, but I was happy to find that I didn’t need either. I spent my days in Spanish class and my nights at yoga, and in between I memorized the city’s plazas and alleys with my footsteps, and felt for the first time that Spain was not just Amir’s, but mine.

The yoga studio’s owner, and my favorite teacher, was also named Angela, a small, muscular woman who looked to be 65 or 70. She wore a silver ponytail and black unitards, and so perfectly demonstrated the poses for us that I had to remind myself not to gawk. Angela could easily do a chaturanga push up, could do handstands and arm balances requiring great strength. How silly it seemed, that I’d once fixated on the skinny young yoga models I was sure filled Amir’s classes, an archetype that, incidentally, made up only a tiny percentage of mine. Thin or not, beautiful or not, how wonderful would it be to arrive at 70 and be so strong and flexible, so utterly grounded in my own body? This was the yogi I wanted to be.

Once, in a class, Angela cued up crow pose, an advanced posture where a person places two hands on the floor, pulls her knees up onto the backs of her upper arms, and tilts forward to float like some kind of sorcerer. I listened to her instructions, smiling and nodding along, then sat on my knees on my mat, happy to take a little rest. I was three months into yoga and growing stronger all the time, but I knew my place, and that place was firmly planted on the ground. 

Angela saw me sitting and shook her head in confusion. She scurried over to me, pulling with her a stack of thick blankets that she placed at the top of my mat, a soft place for landing. “You can,” she said, her brow furrowed as though my sitting out crow pose was the most confusing thing she’d ever seen. I couldn’t let her down, so I placed my hands on the mat and  positioned my legs, lifting one foot, then another in the most awkward of shuffles. I face-planted, of course, but I smiled like a lunatic the whole way down. To her, I’d looked like someone who could fly.

***

In the Upanishads, the sacred scriptures of Hinduism, there’s a concept called purna, or divine wholeness. Brahman, the great creative force that made our whole universe, is seen as utterly, unfathomably perfect, and because we are products of Brahman, we must be perfect, too. At times, we may think of ourselves as deeply flawed, completely hopeless, but as one guru, Swami Krishnananda, teaches us, “a wretched incomplete wreck cannot be manifest from a perfect being.” Just as a pristine cloud cannot create a dirty raindrop, imperfection cannot come from perfection. “None of us is a fragment,” Krisnananda says, “We are not incomplete in any way.”

Recognizing and resting in this divine perfection is the entire point of yoga, though clearly, it took some time for me to get there. My insecurity over Amir’s yoga practice wasn’t exactly about his connection to Brahman. I certainly fell into the western trap of reducing yoga to a workout, to perfect bodies and impressive poses, at least at first. But in true yoga, the poses–or asanas– are just the beginning. We do them to still the body for meditation so we can get to the good stuff: concentration, clear-headedness, enlightenment, wholeness.

I learned about purna from one of my favorite yoga teachers, Leslie, at a studio I joined as soon as the worst of the pandemic had passed. I instantly took to her classes because they were the hardest on the schedule, and I loved the feeling of pushing my body to do so many nearly impossible things. I never would have believed that when I slinked into my first beginner’s class years ago, but I’ve become a whole new person since then, at least yogically speaking. 

I practice at the front of the class now, certain that I belong there as much as anybody. My butt is still one of the bigger ones in class, but that seems like more of a flex these days than a reason for tears. I can plank forever and can easily rise from a low lunge, and once, in the dark of a late December class after the sun had gone down, Leslie cued up crow pose and I lifted one foot and then the other. It was the briefest of liftoffs, but for a second, I flew.

 “I know y’all get tired of me telling you you’re purna,” Leslie says to the group, once the asanas are over and we’ve come to rest on our backs in meditation. She has an Alamban accent and a wild mane of waves, and she plays Genuine and makes jokes, but there’s a weightiness to her teaching, too. Sometimes, when she talks about seeing ourselves as whole, her voice cracks in a way that I recognize, as though maybe she’s lived through her own spells of feeling like a wretched, incomplete wreck. Sometimes, when she ends class by saying how grateful she is to have a yoga practice, I suspect that she, too, first rolled out her mat feeling hopeless  and lost. Whatever her story, I’m never tired of hearing her tell me that I’m purna, and so I lay on my mat, salty and slick as a newborn Venus, always ready to take in her words. “You were born whole,” she says. “You’re perfect simply because you exist.”

I didn’t set out to become like Amir when I first took up yoga, or for that matter, when I began studying Spanish or made Spain my own. The process was never intentional. But I like to think the wild forces that brought me to Amir never stopped working, even when it seemed that they had. I sometimes think that their real purpose was never to bring the two of us together, so much as to wake up all of the little unplanted seeds I’d always carried inside of me. Either way, seven years after Mars and Venus had that meetup in the sky and I decided I was unworthy of a bilingual, worldly yogi like Amir, I have become one myself.

I was never a fragment. I am not incomplete in any way.

***

I missed viewing the Mars-Venus conjunction of February 2015, busy as I was living it. But lately, I’ve taken to viewing photographs of the event online, like a bride pouring over wedding candids from dozens of guests. Here’s Mars and Venus artfully framed by tree branches in North Carolina and craggy peaks in California. Here they are meeting through wispy Italian cirrus clouds, hanging over the Empire State Building, and in a smudgy Albuquerque fog. With every photo I’m struck by how much bigger and brighter Venus is, how she always steals the show.

My favorite photo is actually a composite, a week’s worth of photos stitched together by an amateur photographer in Iowa. I like his creation because you can see not just the conjunction, but the before and after, where each planet comes from and where it goes next. Mars’ path is horizontal, and he seems to creep along across the photo, covering barely an inch from February 18 to the 24th. Venus starts lower in the sky, initially beneath Mars, but her path is a vertical one. She covers triple the ground, racing upward toward Mars,  stopping only briefly to cross his orbit. Then she’s off, blazing up, up, up, a wandering star on a seemingly infinite climb.