Aligned & Awake: The Day I Cried in Bordeaux
A quiet afternoon by the Garonne handed me the truth I’d been running toward. I finally realized I was living the life I once only imagined.
Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.
I started crying somewhere between the pastry and the river.
A quiet misting of emotion, nothing wild, nothing that would alarm a stranger.
More like my body whispered something before my mind realized it had been spoken.
Bordeaux glowed in that soft, honeyed afternoon light it seems to produce on demand.
Cyclists drifting along the promenade.
Kids shouting across the square.
A busker behind me was wrestling an Ed Sheeran chorus into a shape only he understood.
The whole scene moved with a kind of ease I could feel in my shoulders.
With a matcha in one hand and a paper bag in the other, grease blooming through the bottom from a still-warm pastry that I had absolutely not earned in any nutritional sense.
I leaned on the stone wall along the Garonne, watching the river slide past with the confidence of something that knows exactly where it’s going.
And then a sentence landed inside me.
Heavy. Gentle. True.
This is my life.
Not someday.
Not an escape I’d have to return from.
My real life. Mine. Happening in that instant.
On a Tuesday afternoon with crumbs on my coat and sunlight catching the water in a way that felt personal.
My throat tightened.
Not the sad kind of tight.
The oh, you’re here kind.
The kind that arrives when your body recognizes something your mind hasn’t named yet.
I checked the time.
Two in the afternoon.
Old-me would have been in a meeting. Camera on. Voice professional. Face and background arranged.
Speaking in a tone that never belonged to me, while pretending spreadsheets excited me.
Trying to squeeze myself into a life that kept getting smaller.
And I thought of her.
The girl who stopped writing when someone said it wasn’t a real job.
The woman who built her world around someone else’s dream and slowly disappeared inside it.
The one who thought stability meant safety, even when stability felt like a slow erasing.
They hovered beside me for a breath, then loosened their grip.
A quiet passing of the baton.
Another tear slipped out.
Recognition more than grief.
Here I am.
Doing the thing I used to whisper about.
Walking a river path in a foreign city in the middle of the day, letting myself belong to a dream that once felt too fragile to touch.
And still, nothing is fully figured out.
My writing is growing, though it’s not the full-time thing I’m building toward.
Money moves like the tide, coming in and drifting out on its own schedule.
My future has wide, uncharted spaces that feel equal parts thrilling and mildly terrifying.
Yet there I was.
Two o’clock on a Tuesday.
Eating another pastry because joy counts as sustenance in France.
Wandering streets that didn’t know my name.
Living with a freedom that once felt impossible.
A man walked past with his dog.
He glanced politely at my damp eyes.
The dog made a confident lunge for my pastry bag, absolutely sure he deserved it.
I respected his conviction.
The river breathed beside me.
A tram sang as it passed.
Teenagers tumbled over each other in a blur of limbs and laughter.
The city pulsed with life, and for the first time in a long while, I did too.
My mind tried to interrupt.
Shouldn’t you be working?
Should you feel guilty?
Shouldn’t you be more certain?
I handed that voice a job before it spiralled out of control.
Count the boats.
Off it went, satisfied with the assignment.
I wandered until the light softened.
Found a café with a crooked table and a waiter who slid water toward me without comment. His face suggested he’d seen every variety of human emotion and decided to remain unimpressed by all of them.
A kindred spirit.
My laptop opened.
Words came.
Not neatly.
Not with elegance.
But honestly.
Writing the way I used to before I learned to second-guess myself.
Later, in my little room with its clanky radiator and lumpy pillows, I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
No sudden clarity.
No cinematic revelation.
Only a small, grounded knowing.
I’d stepped into a new life without noticing the exact moment I crossed over.
Some arrivals move softly.
More breath than announcement.
More truth than triumph.
And if emotion ever catches you like that
in a city
or a little room
or beside a river you barely know,
pay attention.
Your life might be inching ahead of you, asking you to notice it.
That’s what happened to me on the Garonne.
A quiet reminder that I’m in my real life now.
Not the imagined one I used to escape into.
Not the future-focused one I used to chase.
This one.
The imperfect, half-built, still-wobbling life I’m actually living.
I don’t have everything sorted.
My writing is still becoming.
My future stretches wider than I can map.
Some days I feel brave.
Some days I free-fall.
And still, that moment anchored something in me.
A gentle truth I keep returning to.
I’m living my real life.
Not imagining it.
Not rehearsing it.
Living it.
Scary. Beautiful. Uncertain. Joyful.
All of it at once.
No tidy ending.
No perfect bow.
Just a life unfolding.
And me, learning to meet it as I go.
Tell me…
Where did it hit you?
That quiet moment when you realized your life had shifted into something new. I’d love to hear the place, the feeling, the unexpected Tuesday that changed you.
Beautiful :-) I loved how you gave the voice the job of counting the boats; very wise choice.