Years ago, an older woman noticed the Aquarius tattoo on the back of my neck.

It’s covered now.

A relic beneath newer ink.

A doorway bricked over.

But back then it was visible, and so was I.

I remember loving her immediately.

Not in the way one loves a friend or a lover, but in the way one recognizes something familiar in the wild.

She wore a colorful scarf wrapped loosely around her shoulders and jewelry that seemed to have stories attached to it. There was nothing polished or performative about her. No rehearsed warmth. No social smile.

She carried herself like a woman who had long ago stopped asking permission to be exactly who she was.

I was helping a dear friend (miss you oodles, Kym) sell handmade lavender products from her lavender farm at a Native American solstice celebration at Serpent Mound in Ohio.

The day before we’d attended an intensely emotional and unforgettable ceremonial sweat lodge at a nearby property.

The air smelled of earth and sun-warmed grass.

The energy was… amazing.

Medicinal.

People drifted from booth to booth like leaves carried by the same current.

Native American elders from across the country gathered in this space in ceremonial headdress to chant, drum, give their blessings, and share stories.

It was an absolute honor to be there among them on such a sacred site.

Back then, I spent much… much more time among people who seemed to speak a language beyond words.

I miss that.

The older woman and I exchanged a few sentences, though I couldn’t tell you now what they were about.

Time has taken the details.

What remains is the moment.

She glanced toward the tattoo on my neck.

“Aquarius?” she asked.

I smiled before answering.

There was a certainty in the question.

The unmistakable feeling that she already knew.

“Me too,” she said after I asked.

Then she tilted her head.

Clicked her tongue.

And for the first time, her face softened into something that looked almost like sorrow.

“Poor girl,” she said.

A pause.

I certainly wasn’t expecting that.

“Aquarius and intelligent. It’s a lonely life.”

Then she just… walked away.

Just like that.

Poof.

Gone.

No explanation.

No elaboration.

No attempt to rescue me from the weight of what she’d said.

Only those seven words, left behind like a stone marker on a path I had not yet traveled.

For a moment, I stood perfectly still.

The world continued around me.

Voices drifted through the crowd.

Wind moved through the trees.

But something inside me had gone quiet.

It felt as though time had folded inward like a Möbius strip.

As though the years separating my past from my future had briefly touched.

As though some older version of myself had borrowed a stranger’s face for a moment and come back to leave me a message.

More than a decade has passed since that afternoon.

And now, standing where she once stood, I understand completely.

She was right.

Not because Aquarius is magical.

Not because intelligence is a burden.

And not because my ego tells me I’m special in any way whatsoever, because I am certainly not.

But because there is a particular loneliness that accompanies seeing and experiencing the world so much differently than those around you.

A loneliness born not from solitude, but from translation and experience.

From spending years trying to explain things that arrive fully formed inside your mind.

The older I become, the more that brief encounter feels less like coincidence and more like kismet.

A tiny tear in the fabric of ordinary reality.

A moment when the universe pulled back the curtain just enough to let me glimpse what was waiting ahead.

I never learned her name and we only shared space for maybe five minutes.

Perhaps less.

But every now and then, I think about her.

And I wonder whether she knew that she would remain with me long after everything else about that day had faded away.

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