Choosing My Ronnie in Every Lifetime

If I reach back far enough into my memory, I can still feel the air the day Ronnie and I met in early 1989 — that stubborn, lingering cold New Jersey holds onto long after winter should be gone. I wasn’t thinking about romance or destiny or soul contracts that day. At nineteen, my world was stacked high with responsibility: helping my grandmother Herrmann with her house and office, studying for my two real estate licenses, taking college courses in English journalism and art, balancing the weight of adulthood much too early. I was focused on moving forward, not falling in love.

But fate has always had its own timing.

My aunt called and told me I was watching my cousins so she and her husband could go out. With no time to change, I took the kids as I was — snakeskin leggings with crisscross sides, three-inch heels that made me feel taller, fierce hair, fierce makeup, and that stubborn Jersey fire simmering under my skin. We went to the little park in his hometown, the place where local kids hung around trying to look cooler than they felt.

After a while, the cousins started getting restless, so I gathered them and headed toward my car. As we stepped into the crosswalk near the park entrance, a voice cut across the street — bold, cocky, amused in a way only teenagers can pull off.

“How about a little fries with that shake?”

I stopped. Turned. And there he stood: Ronnie. All swagger, smirk, and broad-shouldered audacity. Something fierce inside me rose up. I marched across the road, heels clicking like punctuation, and slapped him across the face. A real slap. Nothing playful about it. He didn’t flinch. He rubbed his cheek, smirked wider, and said the line that would echo through decades of our lives.

“Ooo, I love them feisty.”

I spun around and walked off, pretending fury, hiding the smile tugging at my lips. Yes, I let my hips sway a little extra — because I could feel his eyes on me. Something ancient passed between us that moment, a quiet recognition neither of us understood yet.

Months later, after a drunken fall with a friend sent me into a barbed-wire fence — tearing my cheek and tongue, leaving me bandaged and mortified — it was Ronnie who reached out. He invited me to his father’s kitchen. I went reluctantly. He touched the bandaged stitches along my cheek with gentle hands and whispered, “You’re still so beautiful.” Something in me shifted again, deeper this time. But life, complicated as it is, wasn’t ready for us.

We drifted into the wrong marriages, raised children in dysfunctional environments, and carried wounds that shaped us both. My daughters stopped speaking to me in 2005. The fracture didn’t happen in one moment — it was the long result of a marriage full of pain, fear, and emotional chaos. His daughters carried their own distances: one drifted in and out, the other no contact at all. These losses live inside me like weather that never fully clears. They shape the way I love, the way I protect, the way I survive.

Yet even across those years, something between Ronnie and me never died. It just waited.

In 2002, our paths collided again. Older, bruised, exhausted, but still undeniably us. We spent time together with our girls, sharing laughter we didn’t know we’d been starving for. One night during the Subway Series, I jumped up cheering for my Yankees and Ronnie grabbed me and kissed me with thirteen years of longing behind it. It didn’t feel like something beginning — it felt like something remembering.

Everything changed after that. The confrontation with my then-husband turned violent. I broke free and ran from the house at 2 a.m., straight into Ronnie’s arms waiting on the porch. Choosing Ronnie meant losing everything else: stability, family, acceptance. We walked through homelessness, slept in my Ford Explorer, and faced a relentless storm of courtrooms, judgment, and sabotage. But we stayed together. Even when everything else fell apart, we stayed.

In 2007, we packed six bags, bought two one-way tickets, and moved to Tucson with nothing but hope and each other. The desert stripped everything down to its bones. We rebuilt from nothing — mentally, emotionally, financially. Tucson gave us a fresh start, but fresh starts don’t erase old wounds.

His daughter — the one who drifted — came to live with us in 2010. Those years, from 2010 to 2014, tested every part of me. We tried to offer structure, safety, love, but her storms were heavier than anything we could anchor against. By 2017 she was gone entirely, carrying her own version of the story, calling me the evil stepmother, accusing me of things we will not relive. The pain of it left marks, but we survived it — and surviving had to be enough.

We lived through his near-fatal pancreatitis in 2011, my septic shock in 2016, financial strain, moves that never seemed to settle, and the constant push and pull of trying to build a life on shifting ground. Through every blow, we kept choosing each other.

Nothing, though, prepared me for October 2023.

He’d called out of work again that morning. His voice carried the familiar weight of alcohol. I told him it was the drinking or me — he had to choose. I walked into my office to calm down, but then I heard him shout something that froze everything inside me: that he should do what our landlord had done to himself. Before I could even react, the house erupted into chaos. He grabbed his 9mm, loaded it, and despair twisted him into someone I didn’t recognize. I didn’t freeze. I didn’t scream. I went at him with everything in me. We wrestled through the living room, down the hallway, out into the yard. Minutes turned into nearly two hours. My work computer sat open on my desk, waiting for me to answer emails — while I fought for my husband’s life.

I knew this wasn’t him. Not the boy from the park. Not the man from the kitchen table. Not the one who kissed me like destiny. This was pain. This was addiction. This was despair wearing his face. I fought the darkness, not him.

In the end, I tore the gun out of his hands.

He promised he would stop drinking. I wanted to believe him. But addiction digs deep. He drank behind my back, and when the truth came out, it broke something — but it forced change too.

On October 8, 2024, his body forced him to stop. And the next day, everything shattered.

He hit his head at work. Called me, said he was bleeding and heading to urgent care. Minutes later, the calls came — his manager first, then the paramedics. He had fallen again. He was unresponsive. There was too much blood. They were taking him to St. Joseph’s. When the paramedic said, “He may not survive,” something inside me splintered. My breath vanished. My vision blurred. I remember gripping the counter, trying to stay upright while the room tilted. The drive to the hospital felt endless and unreal.

The next seventy-two hours became a world of sterile lights, skull fracture, two brain bleeds, whispered updates, and fear so thick it lived under my skin. When they finally let me see him — pale, still, surrounded by machines — I had to steady myself just to stay standing. And when he opened his eyes again, fragile and uncertain, something inside me broke and healed at the same time.

Life didn’t return to normal after that. The TBI rewired everything — his memory, his emotions, the way he processed the world. And it rewired me too.

My employer gave me the time I needed. I spent every day taking care of the house, the pets, the responsibilities that don’t pause for trauma, and then going to the hospital to sit by his side. When he finally came home, I became his caregiver while working full-time — managing meals, appointments, medications, moods, confusion, exhaustion, and the unpredictable storms that come with brain injuries. Not once did resentment or anger touch me. If anything, loving him through his vulnerability deepened something inside me. It made our marriage stronger, more honest, more rooted.

People told me — his doctors, the nurse case manager, the Workman’s Comp adjuster, the physical therapist — that most couples do not survive this. They told me relationships crumble under the stress, the emotional swings, the exhaustion. They told me I was strong, that most people couldn’t do what I was doing. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t trying to be strong. I stayed because I love him. Because he is my home across lifetimes. Because losing him was not an option.

Slowly, he came back to himself. Strength in small moments. Memory in flickers. Soft laughter returning like sunlight through clouds. And then came the day something shifted behind his eyes — a spark, a decision. He wasn’t giving up on himself. Or on us.

On December 8, 2025, he got up before dawn, dressed, and went to his first full-time shift at the warehouse since the injury. That moment felt like resurrection — a reclaiming of the life the TBI tried to steal.

During his recovery, I found myself at the kitchen table one night with our soul charts laid out in front of me. I wasn’t looking for answers. I was looking for language for what my heart already knew. His Taurus Sun grounding my Leo fire. His Virgo Moon steadying my Pisces Moon. Our Nodes pointing toward the same destiny. The patterns weren’t coincidence. They were continuity — a thread running through lifetimes. It explained the spark in 1989, the ache of separation, the impossible pull that kept bringing us back. It wasn’t just love. It was remembering.

And when I look at our photographs — from the kids we were to the adults we became — I see the story written across our faces. Every smile, every stolen glance, every arm around each other tells a part of the truth: that we are two souls who have found each other again and again.

Now, in 2026, our life is simple and sacred. We take walks. We clean the yard. We watch Scooby-Doo. We cook. We laugh. We hold hands. We choose each other every day. His warm chocolate-brown eyes still undo me. He smells like Dior Sauvage and home. He looks good in jeans, in dress clothes, in everything. And when he wraps his arms around me, I feel safe in a way that only comes from loving someone across lifetimes.

People who knew us as kids say our story is a fairy tale. Not the sparkling kind. The real kind — forged in storms, tested by fire, bound by fate. And they’re right.

After everything we’ve lived, everything we’ve survived, everything we’ve rebuilt, I know this with absolute certainty:

I have loved him in every lifetime.

And I will choose him in every one yet to come.