"Does it bother you that I have hallucinogenic mushrooms in the kitchen cabinet?"
"It doesn’t bother me," she says. "Don’t assume how I’m feeling."
"I didn’t mean to scare you," I say.
Juliet exhales. Her fingers play on my chest. "You know what I care about?" she says. "I care about you taking care of yourself..getting enough sleep..getting enough to eat.." (here she looks at me) "..not drinking too much. I just don’t want you to see you hurt yourself. You’re my baby," she says. "I don’t want anything to hurt you."
She tells me her fears. She’s afraid of losing me. She’s afraid she’ll never feel connected, if we lose each other. She says she was alone for a long time before she found me. She says she missed me, even before we met. Jules tells me things I don’t believe—but that maybe I’m starting to. She tells me that we were together once, in outer space—or..she didn’t say outer space, but it was something like that—like we were together in the primordial ooze or we were together before everything got separated..like before wars and before humanity lost track of where we came from..before we forgot our origins, there was togetherness, and she and I were together. I don’t know if she means in a literal sense. Maybe she does. Maybe she really means that our spirits were together, before, and the us we are now have just forgotten. But it does feel like that when I’m with her. It does feel like we were separated at one point. Like we were always together, and then somehow we got separated. And I never want to be separated from her again, from this part of me that I deserve and that I need..I don’t know about outer space and I don’t know about past lives..but that’s how it feels. That’s how it feels, to be with her—like I’m back together with some part of me that somehow I forgot. Of which she reminds me.
"I don’t want anything to ever hurt you either, ok Jules?"
"Oh, good; no, no, no, I don’t want anything to ever hurt us. Or hurt my baby," she says, smoothing back my hair.
"No—nothing," I say. "I missed you too."
"I know—you did??!" she says.
"Of course I did."
"I don’t ever want to be without you. I don’t ever want to lose you," she says. "Never again. You won’t leave me, will you?"
"No."
"I’m afraid of losing you."
I tell her the way to release yourself from fear of loss is by fully accepting loss.
She tells me she wants to hold me like a mother holds her child and help dissolve my fears.
"Promise that you’ll never leave me," I say.
"I won’t," she says. "I will hold you to my spirit forever. I will hold you to my spirit forever. I will hold you to my spirit forever." She opens her eyes. "Did you know that it was me, when you first saw me? I knew it was you."
"Yes, I knew right away. I knew in the first moment."
"You did??"
"Yes, baby, I knew the minute I saw you."
"I knew the minute I saw you too. Yes yes yes."
"Yes."
Yes. For a minute that’s all we say: Yes.
Yes.
That Big Yes.
That yes that’s only in the eyes.
That yes..that only happens once..then gets repeated, over and over again. "There’s only one yes," I say.
"There is only one yes," Jules says.
"In the beginning, there was yes," I say.
"Oh, yessss," she says.
"There was only yes."
"There was only yes."
"And the yes got split," I say.
And there came the fear.
"The yes was split. It was split by questioning. They forgot the yes. And then they learned no and why and all the other things that aren’t yes."
"Yes," she says. "But what happened then?"
"After they were lost?"
She nods.
"Some people..just here and there..a few of them..they found the yes again."
"Yes?"
"Yes."
"And then what did they do?"
"They found the pieces..that they had forgotten."
"Then what? What did they do?"
"You know what they did."
"Mm hmm." Jules is nodding. Our faces touch. "They put them back together."