Re the human desire to romanticize all this, my original essay was 3250 words and I had to cut it back to the contest's 2000 word limit. I preserved the longer version and suspect that I will revise it and publish it in the future. Tempering for many, and disturbing to some, are these words from wise White Feather that ended up cut from this version of the essay:
"What if every single person you meet in your life you've met before in other lives? Imagine that for a moment just for fun. No one is a stranger. Everyone is a soul-mate acting out every conceivable sort of relationship.
It is like taking two actors and putting them on a stage then giving them a few hundred different plays to act out together. In one play actor A is a father and actor B is a daughter. In another play actor A is a soldier and actor B is also a soldier who happens to kill actor A. In another play actors A and B fall in love and have seven kids. In another play, actors A and B never meet until right before they die. In yet another play actor A is a wife who is beaten by her husband who happens to be actor B. In still another life actors A and B end up being a songwriting team as well as gay lovers who write several Broadway musicals together. Then there is the life A and B lived together in the jungles of Sumatra. It was primitive times and A and B were hunting together. A slipped on a steep ledge on the side of a mountain and breaks his leg. B is afraid to climb down to save A and he leaves A to die.
As you can see, the possibilities are endless for plays for the two actors to play out together. We have soul-mates because monologues get boring. We want a play with more than just one actor so that we can see and experience the drama of interaction. Our soul-mates are those fellow actors in the same acting company that we signed up for. We have contracted to create as many dramas as we can so we can experience interaction from as many different perspectives as possible so that a wholeness of experience can be achieved."
Terry, I wonder how you would react to the full nature of Lindsey's and my relationship. I have disclosed it on Medium here and I hint at it and link to this story often but I think very few click through, https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/a-defiant-lovestory-89d431ba5bf9. Perhaps when I publish a revised version of the long form of the instant essay, it's time to be clearly revealing again.
