From Journal Entry: 12/25/1998
It was an astral projection unlike anything I had ever experienced before. At the time, I was in a relationship with a man named Brian. I loved him deeply. Deeply enough that walking away felt like breaking my own heart open. But our relationship had become painful. We had been on and off for about a year. Brian struggled with drugs and alcohol, and no matter how much love existed between us, love could not heal what he wasn’t ready to face himself. I knew I had to end the relationship. And still… I loved him.
That Christmas night, I left my body. In the astral experience, I found myself standing in front of a large building with many doors. It didn’t feel like Earth. It felt like another place entirely… another realm, another planet, something beyond this physical world.
I wasn’t alone. I was with my spirit guide. I knew it instantly without needing words. There was this deep inner knowing that my guide was there to help me find Brian.
I remember feeling urgency. Like I didn’t have much time. Like I had been given a brief window to reach him before I had to return to my body. My guide led me through this place as I searched for him. And then I found him. Only… he didn’t look like himself. His form was altered…almost disfigured—human, but not human. As if the place he existed in shaped him differently there. And yet I recognized him immediately. By his eyes.
His eyes were unmistakably Brian. That part of him was still completely him. I reached my hand out toward him because I needed to say goodbye. Not with words. Something deeper than words. And then something unexpected happened. His tongue extended out toward me…long, almost like a frog’s tongue and wrapped around me.
As strange as that sounds, there was nothing frightening about it. That touch… that contact… was the goodbye. In that single moment, there was an exchange between us. Communication without language. Emotion without explanation. Recognition soul to soul. It felt like closure. It felt like love. And it felt like release.
Looking back now, I believe what I was shown was Brian beyond the physical version of himself I knew on Earth. His outer appearance was changed, but his eyes…his essence—remained. And that has always stayed with me. Because addiction can distort a person’s life, their choices, their body, even how they show up in the world… but somewhere beneath all of it, their soul still exists untouched.
I believe I found that part of him. The part untouched by suffering. The part I had always recognized.
For me, this experience became more than saying goodbye to a man I loved. It became saying goodbye to the future I hoped we would have. Goodbye to the part of me that believed love could save someone who wasn’t ready to save himself. Goodbye to the bond we shared in physical form while honoring that something real existed between us beyond words, beyond distance, and maybe even beyond this world.
My spirit guide didn’t bring me there to change anything. Only to help me find him. And perhaps to witness the closing of a chapter my soul needed to complete. I’ve carried this experience with me since 1998. Some spiritual experiences fade with time. This one never did. Because some goodbyes happen here in the physical world…
And some happen somewhere between worlds.
— Madison Meadows