It was more than perfect understanding

Sometimes, when you are introduced to someone for the first time, or perhaps you simply read their words or hear their voice, you can sense an air of mutual understanding. It's as if a certain alarm goes off in your brain, one that you set a long time ago in the hopes of capturing like-minded individuals before they run away. And you're drawn to this person for what might appear to be selfish reasons--you want someone who can empathize completely with you, someone to share the pain and the joy with, someone sitting there next to you, always. There's a voice inside of you, begging you not to let them escape because you know that as you grow older and your personality becomes more complex there will be fewer and fewer people that you'll be able to conect with so perfectly. So you enjoy the special bond you have, confident that there is nothing better than this.

I saw you before I met you and I allowed my imagination to fill in the holes that your silence provided. They were nothing more than silly presumptions, but I was immature and innocent and therefore I didn't know any better. I fell in love with the little plastic you I had constructed in my brain. I took you out of my brain one day and entombed you in a glass jar, perfectly understanding, perfectly preserved. And so you stayed, removed from both reality and my thoughts, frozen in the impossible circumstances and chaotic fantasies I had created to be your atmosphere, for nearly six months.

You'd like to know how I believed you to be in my depraved mentality, I'm sure. You were me, except without the imperfections. It was as though you were my evolved form; complete and perfect, yet fully aware of the flaws you had possesed and overcome. In that way, you could both understand me like no other and instruct me correctly. You were my true savior because you turned such an evil and broken thing as myself into something so infinitely good and flawless as yourself. I loved you because I knew no better than to love what I couldn't become.

You become a real little boy when I quit looking for something to compensate for my low self-esteem. I allowed you to speak and fill the holes in your personality with the most beautiful manifestion of reality I had ever encountered. You were not me; I was not you. Neither of us knew each other completely or understood each other pefectly but we had something much more than that. I could look back on the wish of perfect understanding and laugh because this was immensely greater. When I looked into your eyes I could see all my life and all of yours and I couldn't really understand a single moment in either one, but it was comforting, and my life seemed to continue through yours and yours through mine. Maybe we were just waiting for each other as an extension to ourselves, not an explanation.

Our love wouldn't be perfect. And I don't know what to do right now with this odd connection we have but to dissect it in every way possible in the hopes of finding some option that would allow us to live happily together. I don't know if I can do it. I know I can't do it alone, but I'm so afraid to ask...afraid it might ruin this imperfect understanding we share.

I don't want to grow up and think back on this, on all these missed chances, and feel like I've made a horrible mistake. Right now I'm not certain which type of understanding is better: perfect or imperfect. I've only experienced the latter, only dreamed of the former.

I should really do something about this indecisiveness...

Like two people from same town back home. Like two men hurt in love by the same girl. Like two gringos.

It was an understanding that needed no words. He knew what she's about to say before she said it. She answered the question he was about to ask without his inasmuch as uttering a single word. They took the same turns when walking together even if it was the first time they were walking this way, even if they were not going anywhere - just being together.

Like two Englishmen in the New York. Like Chiron and his wounded patients. Like two people with same disability. Two minority race individuals in a racist society.

The first time they met across that tenuous link through little eight-point font, they felt they are close to getting what they were looking for, what everyone is looking for. Their missing half. No third person had what they both had.

When Gods created humans, says this ancient story, he created a hermaphrodite. Then he divided it in two halves - a male and a female. They both since then, roam around earth looking for their other half, their missing 'self'; everyone longs to be completed again.

Like two first generation immigrants. Like two people hiding under the same roof from the riot-massacre.

"The most bizarre idea the creator ever had ...", he started saying.

"... was to attach love with sex.", she finished the sentence.

Sometimes they don't even say the sentences. A simple gesture speaks the volumes, a simple eye contact is the longest love talk anyone has ever had.

"What if you already have a half, and you're complete, but then you see another half and it occurs to you that you've been wrong all along...Your actual other half is this new person...? What does one do then?", they said, (either he did or she ... if you knew them like I do, you wouldn't care who did either.)

"No one asked the Prophet this question. How I wish they had..."

"What does one do then?" She asked him, (or he asked her), "What decides the justice? The moral behavior? What separates selfishness from honesty here?"

No replies were spoken, no discussions started ... there were eyes looking into eyes, hands touching hands ...

Like two people who've read exactly the same novels. Like two chess players playing the same game...like two lost souls in a fishbowl...