Mai Taeo: The Beautiful Story of us - September 4, 2024

Everything had to end so that life could begin.

That is where this story starts.

Not with Mai Taeo.

With death.

In 2020, I was at Mt. Henderson, Nevada, sitting around a sacred fire with my former fiancé, Chris, and two friends. We had fasted and each taken roughly four grams of mushrooms.

Somewhere inside that altered state, everything changed.

I watched Chris lose consciousness. His breathing seemed to disappear. His body moved toward the fire, and I reacted instinctively. I knocked him away from it and went to hold him.

In that moment, I experienced him as dead.

My friend ran to call the police.

Minutes stretched into something outside of time and I looked into the empty eyes of the love that meant everything to me.

Then it was almost as though someone snapped their fingers.

Suddenly Chris was sitting upright again, looking around at all of us and asking what was happening.

To watch someone I loved appear to die and then return was terrifying.

But what disturbed me most was not simply that his body came back.

It was the feeling that the person I had known had somehow changed.

That something had ended even though life continued.

I did not yet understand what that night would mean to me. I only knew that the relationship, the world I had built around it, and my understanding of love were beginning to collapse.

Eventually Chris and I separated.

And about a year later, sometime in the summer of 2021, another question started rising inside me:

Can new love begin again?

The Sunrise

I was helping co-produce Tennessee Fireflies at Catoosa in Tennessee.

One morning I woke on the backside of the property around the sacred fire.

The sun was rising.

Music was playing.

And there you were.

Mai Taeo.

Freedom Kingdom.

It was the first time I had ever seen you.

You were playing music as the sun came alive, and something about the scene felt strangely familiar... as though an image from a dream had somehow made its way into waking life.

I did not know you.

I did not know your story.

I did not know the family I would eventually meet.

I did not know that years of my life would become entangled with yours.

I only knew that I felt held.

When you finished playing, I asked if I could share a sacred hymn.

I sang.

You listened.

Then you asked if you could play something on my drum.

You played “Little Drum.”

I don't think either of us understood what that day would come to mean to me.

But I do now.

At another fire... the kind of place that had once represented terror and endings... I was shown that life could begin again.

So I began.

Not with a declaration.

With curiosity.

With an interest.

With a quiet knowing that perhaps something larger existed outside the walls of the life I had already built.

It still took years to truly separate myself emotionally from my former relationship.

It took even longer to understand my patterns of codependency.

But meeting you was one of the first moments when I could imagine a future that was not simply the continuation of my past.

North Carolina

A few months later, I found myself in North Carolina.

Your pride sun was born.

I was there the day he entered the world.

Pride Sun and Sister Moon are your biological children, but my relationship with them became part of the reason this story grew beyond attraction.

I did not simply meet a man I loved.

I entered a family ecosystem.

I watched a baby become a little person.

I helped care for him from infancy.

I became familiar with routines, needs, moods, responsibilities, tension, joy, exhaustion, and the strange intimacy that comes from sharing life around children.

And somewhere in those months, my question changed.

It was no longer simply:

Am I attracted to this man?

It became:

Am I falling in love with my friend?

I met your partner.

I met your children.

I learned the rhythms of your household.

I began to understand you not as an idea but as a father, partner, musician, worker, man, and human being.

And I experienced your attention without immediately feeling that I had to earn it through sex or performance.

That mattered to me.

A lot.

There was softness.

There was curiosity.

There was emotional intimacy.

But there was also something else.

A feeling that the relationship between us was being observed, interpreted, and sometimes managed from outside of it.

“Arizona Is My Edge.”

October 2021.

Naples.

A friend was there.

He had previously been involved with your ex-wife, and in that moment he became something else: a person willing to hold space while the three of us tried to speak honestly about polyamory, sexuality, boundaries, and what exactly was happening between you and me.

The conversation became tense.

Your ex began speaking about your sexuality and about what she believed was or was not acceptable in her marriage.

And then you interrupted her.

You said:

“Stop talking.” Like a lion cub finding his pride for the first time.

Then you spoke for yourself.

You said there was an attraction between Arizona and you.

You said it was something you had never experienced before.

You said I was there to show you your edge.

And you said that the fact you had not explored that edge did not mean you were not interested.

You said you had not felt safe enough within your relationship to try.

That moment mattered because it did not come from my imagination.

It came from you.

For once, I wasn't interpreting a glance.

I wasn't reading energy.

I wasn't looking for hidden meaning.

You spoke.

And I listened.

My original memory of that moment was that I saw your internal fire light up... that I witnessed you standing in your own truth rather than allowing somebody else to define it for you.

I rose deeper.

But I also understood that you were not ready to leap.

So I tried to remain your friend.

I came when invited.

I left when asked.

I told you what I felt.

You listened.

You never mocked my emotions.

Sometimes you told me you did not feel the same depth of desire.

I heard you.

At other times, you spoke about transformation, freedom, safety, and expanding the ways you were capable of loving.

I heard those things too.

The mistake I sometimes made was turning those moments into prophecy.

I took possibility and began building architecture around it.

A house.

A future.

A partnership.

A story.

I would eventually have to learn the difference between what someone actually tells you and what love allows you to imagine.

The Family Years

Time continued.

I became increasingly woven into the family.

There were months and years of supporting the household, being around the children, helping when things were difficult, listening when you needed closeness, and stepping away when you asked for space.

I felt devoted.

At the time, I interpreted much of that devotion through the language of partnership.

I felt as though I was already practicing a kind of love that had simply not been given a conventional name.

I saw myself showing up.

Listening.

Helping.

Adapting.

Trying to love without demanding.

And creatively, something else began happening.

You were becoming a muse.

Music started accumulating around the experience of loving you.

The yearning.

The patience.

The confusion.

The calls back.

The distance.

The moments when I felt seen.

The moments when I felt erased.

Eventually that body of work became The Devotion Codex.

Sixteen songs.

A record of love.

Not sixteen songs proving that you were destined to be mine.

Sixteen songs documenting what loving you did to me.

How it stretched me.

How it exposed my wounds.

How often I heard, directly or indirectly, that I was somehow not enough.

And how strangely, despite everything, I kept finding myself called back into your orbit.

June 2024

Then came June 2024.

You had been bitten by a tick and developed Bell's palsy.

Your face had changed.

Your smile was crooked.

You were sick.

You were still trying to manage everything.

And I was called back to help.

I came.

I helped care for you.

I helped with the children.

I stepped again into the role I knew so well: the person who could arrive when the system around you was overwhelmed.

And one of the most intimate moments in this entire story happened without anything actually happening.

I looked at you.

At your face.

At the way your smile had changed.

And I wanted to kiss you.

Not out of pity.

Not because I thought illness made you vulnerable.

Because I loved you.

In that moment, my mind even created the romantic fantasy that somehow one kiss could heal you.

But I didn't.

I stopped.

Because I did not know whether you wanted that from me.

And I understood that love does not give me ownership over another person's body.

I stayed inside the boundary.

That restraint mattered.

Maybe more than the kiss ever could have.

And you got better.

July 23, 2024

Then everything broke.

You were in South Africa with family.

I was touring with Eagle Woman and producing an event at a venue.

We arrived at your house late.

She was upset.

The situation escalated.

In front of my production friends, I felt publicly diminished and spoken down to.

I responded badly too.

I called her a devil witch and walked away.

I was furious.

Humiliated.

Done.

I bought a flight to South Africa.

I wanted to leave everything and come see you.

A year or so before that, she had asked me a hypothetical question:

If you and Your Taeo never ended up together, would you still want to be part of this family?

At the time I had said yes.

But standing inside the wreckage of that July night, my answer had changed.

No.

I realized that without my relationship with you, I did not want to keep pouring myself into a family system where I felt disregarded.

I stayed anyway.

I produced.

I completed what I had agreed to do.

But by the end of the night, the conflict reignited.

I said I should have gone to South Africa to see you.

And from there, private questions about your sexuality and the relationship dynamics between all of us began spilling into public space from her mouth.

That was the fracture.

Not the first disagreement.

Not the first boundary.

The fracture.

From that point forward, the intimate and unresolved material between us was no longer contained between the people actually living it.

People chose sides.

Stories hardened.

Intentions were assigned.

And eventually I felt as though I was no longer a person inside the story.

I was becoming a character other people were writing.

Haunting Voices

Out of that came “Haunting Voices.”

You and I produced it together.

For me, the song became a poetic account of what had happened between all of us.

The voices that tell us who we are.

The voice of a partner.

The voice of a lover.

The voice of fear.

The voice that stays silent.

The voice inside ourselves that becomes distorted when everybody else is speaking too loudly.

That song sits inside The Devotion Codex because the record was never simply about romance.

It was about what happens to a person when love, rejection, spirituality, family, sexuality, worth, and belonging all begin speaking at once.

In my original telling, I described the experience as your voice remaining silent while other voices cut into my sense of worth and rearranged my memories.

I fell apart.

And instead of making the collapse entirely your fault, I disappeared for a while and tried to rebuild myself.

Freedom Kingdom

Freedom Kingdom.

That was mine.

My vision.

A name for the future I imagined could exist if you and I ever chose one another.

At the time, I blurred those two things.

Your existing life.

My imagined future.

What we had actually created.

And what I hoped we would someday create.

Today I can separate them.

What was yours was yours.

Freedom Kingdom was my dream.

Maybe that is one of the most important acts of love I can perform now:

to stop claiming that a future I envisioned was a future you had already consented to.

The Mountains

While compiling The Devotion Codex, I went into the mountains.

I traveled.

Camped.

Wrote.

Thought.

I began imagining another version of my life.

I toured the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

It was not yet some finalized educational destiny.

It was a tour.

A possibility.

I met people in the arts.

I imagined interdisciplinary study.

Screenwriting.

Film.

Music.

History.

Culture.

Performance.

Fashion.

A life where every strange fragment of who I am could finally exist in the same room.

In my original letter, I was already designing the house before I had even chosen the school.

I imagined land.

Rooms.

A yard.

A secure private place.

I imagined you there.

The children.

Music.

Family.

Creation.

A place where nobody had to hide.

That was where my mind always went with you:

not simply toward sex.

Toward life.

September 11, 2024

I bought two tickets.

Clarence Brown Theatre.

Knoxville.

Six o'clock.

I pictured us seeing a show in a city where nobody knew either of our names.

A night without everyone else's expectations.

A night where nothing had to be decided.

Just two people meeting each other again.

I invited you.

You did not respond.

Then I saw the Facebook post.

You and your ex were renewing your vows for your seventh anniversary.

I was devastated.

And instead of sitting quietly with that devastation, I reacted publicly.

I wrote something cruel.

I made an accusation about her sexual health that did not belong in public conversation.

Whatever pain I was experiencing, that was not an honorable way to express it.

I can own that.

I was hurt.

And I hurt back.

That matters too.

I cannot write a story about everyone else's failures and leave myself morally untouched.

February 22, 2025

Months later, everything became public again.

On February 22, 2025, you made a Facebook post about me.

You described my relationship with your ex and with you as manipulation.

You said I had befriended your wife in order to remain close to you and attempt to change your sexuality.

You referenced sexual conversations between us in a way that I felt removed their surrounding context.

And then hundreds of people began commenting.

People who did not know the years behind the story.

People who had never sat beside those fires.

People who had never heard the Naples conversation.

People who did not know the children, the music, the sickness, the household, the boundaries, the arguments, or the Devotion Codex.

The comments became larger than the actual relationship.

My mental health became part of the public discussion.

People generalized about gay men refusing to respect straight men.

People decided what kind of person I was from a post and a collection of stories.

And I felt something old return.

That teenage feeling.

The feeling of being discussed rather than spoken to.

Of being interpreted by a crowd.

Of sexuality becoming evidence against my character.

We fought through text afterward.

And then:

silence.

You have not spoken to me since.

What Remains

So what is the story now?

For a long time, I would have told you:

God prepared me for Mai Taeo.

God prepared Mai Taeo for me.

We are divine union.

He simply has to overcome his fear.

One day he will jump.

One day the life I saw will arrive.

But I have grown enough to understand that I cannot know another person's destiny.

I can know what happened to me.

I can know what you actually said.

I can know what I felt.

I can know what I imagined.

I can know what I hoped for.

And I can know what your actions eventually communicated.

Silence is information too.

That does not erase Naples.

It does not erase Tennessee Fireflies.

It does not erase Little Drum.

It does not erase Pride Sun birth.

It does not erase Sister Moon.

It does not erase Bell's palsy.

It does not erase the nights when we talked.

It does not erase the ways I showed up.

It does not erase the ways you showed up.

It does not erase Haunting Voices.

It does not erase The Devotion Codex.

And it does not require me to turn you into either the villain or the soulmate.

Maybe you were my edge too.

Maybe that was always the mirror.

You became the man through whom I had to learn the difference between love and possession.

Between intuition and certainty.

Between spiritual meaning and another person's free will.

Between devotion and self-abandonment.

Between patience and waiting indefinitely.

Between being invited into someone's life and designing the rest of that life without them.

I used to say:

I used to be your edge, but now I'm the cure. I used to be your boundary, but now I'm the door.

I don't think I need to be your cure anymore.

And perhaps I was never supposed to be.

You do not need me to heal your life.

I do not need you to complete mine.

What I can be is the person who tells the truth about what loving you awakened in me.

I loved you.

I may always carry some form of that love.

But love does not require access.

Love does not require agreement.

Love does not require that you publicly validate my memories.

And love certainly does not require me to continually injure myself proving that it existed.

There is one sentence from the original letter that survives all of this better than anything else:

I'm not here to tell you who you are. I'm just asking you to see.

I mean that differently now.

I'm not here to tell you that you are gay.

Straight.

Bi.

Poly.

Closeted.

My divine masculine.

My future husband.

My destiny.

My lesson.

My cure.

Those definitions belong to you.

I can only tell you who I was.

I was the man who woke beside a sacred fire and saw you playing music at sunrise.

I was the friend who met your baby the day he was born.

I was the person sitting in Naples when you told the room that there was an attraction between us.

I was the person who helped with your family.

I was the person who saw your crooked smile and wanted to kiss you but didn't.

I was the person who wrote sixteen songs.

I was the person who imagined a kingdom.

I was the person who bought two theatre tickets.

I was the person who waited for an answer.

I was also the person who sometimes reacted from pain.

Who said things I regret.

Who confused spiritual conviction with certainty.

Who needed another man's love to prove something about my own worth.

And I am no longer that exact person.

Maybe this story was never about whether we finally kissed.

Maybe the entire story was teaching me how to tell someone:

I love you

without adding:

therefore you belong to me.

That is the devotion now.

Not possession.

Truth.

You inspired a body of music.

You participated in years of my becoming.

You became intertwined with questions about my sexuality, spirituality, masculinity, femininity, family, service, art, and belonging.

That is enormous.

But enormous does not have to mean eternal partnership.

Sometimes the greatest love story is the one that changes who you become, even if the two people do not walk into the final scene together.

So this is where I leave us.

Not at the cliff waiting for you to jump.

Not at the theatre waiting for you to arrive.

Not beneath a Facebook post defending myself to strangers.

I leave us where we began.

At sunrise.

A sacred fire behind us.

Music in the air.

Two people who did not yet know what they would mean to one another.

You with my drum in your hands.

Me listening.

And a new life quietly beginning.

Thank you for that first moment.

Thank you for the music.

Thank you for the family I was allowed to know.

Thank you for everything beautiful.

And even for what hurt, thank you for what it eventually taught me.

You once showed me an edge.

I spent years imagining that we were both supposed to jump from it together.

Now I understand:

some edges are not asking us to jump toward another person.

They are asking us to finally step into ourselves.

Mai Taeo.

The story of us.

And now...

the story of me.

The Beautiful Story Never Told, Jo He and Mai Taeo

"Cause I’m in it for the long haul. So I’ll be right here. The cross was the heavy to carry on our own. Together we carry our share... I wont give up on big love. "