There were two people who lived their whole lives together. Their parents were neighbors and from the time they were born until the time they left home they were very nearly at each other’s fingertips. Their parents were never friends and perhaps never exchanged a single word; yet somehow the children found each other immediately, as though their time in the womb had been spent waiting for the other. And when they were born their friendship came easily, for every form of expression and communication they learned and tested with the other, until at some point early in their lives it happened that the only judge deep enough to evaluate themselves was the other. They learned a great deal from their parents, things that often conflicted with what they had produced together, that often punished their intimacy; and yet they felt an obligation to their souls – their own souls – that seemed to always bring them back to their most primitive interactions. The smile was spread between them. And it is not to say that they had replaced their parental love for the other’s love because they were both close enough to their parents. But their parents passed away in time and they lived on together.
This was never something they had planned or were very much concerned about, but it was something that they slowly realized, which was that they would live on together, and that they were the most perfectly established companions. They often wondered why they didn’t need more sex, different sex, fresher love… in truth the fidelity was broken - just once, and it led nowhere but it reminded both of them that they were still very different people, irreconcilably different people. Even so, it simply worked out that they never wanted to let go, the way some leaves seem desperate to fall at the turn of autumn while others inexplicably hold on and gather their color. And when strangers reacted with surprise and uneasiness at the length of their connection, they always felt that ungraspable sense in which they were spun together – for it was not for any reason other than that it was thus that they had developed the way that they had. They understood sometimes how they inhabited what for most would have been a secret backyard to their original home; an empty yard where their own histories played out through the games and inventions of childhood. They had ancestral longings for places unfathomable to those without a single unbroken path. Indeed, most often they were only understood by others in the way one could see two people playing through the maze of overgrown thickets.
In time, the specialness of their relationship waned. Soon, neither they nor their friends remembered their childhood particularly well, and the length of their love only exceeded other people’s by distant years. Most felt old and unchanged. And the two of them didn’t often have an occasion for looking back on the thicketed path behind them, at least not all the way. There was so much to interrupt the journey that the reflection was much more complicated and difficult than letting time carry them on as it does. But always was that presence behind them, that penumbrous heat of the other’s body, lingering on, inextinguishable from the depths of the buried mind. Whatever ghosts they had were touching.
They also lived longer than all their friends. They thought it a proper joke that they had outlasted the other lovers on both ends. And yet… it would have been misguided to say they were both not looking forward to death. For as content and unhurried as they were, somewhere in the two of them was restless for their next step. They had tackled most of the unknowns that were presented to them in life with varying degrees of success, and they seemed to have exhausted the ones that they were likely to encounter. Their children were already with their own families, and so in many ways to them the great project of life had completed successfully. They were lucky for the long walks that their bodies could still handle for a while. Then, slowly, their bodies began to give way and they sat side by side watching all the neighboring children in their own back yards from a distance. Above all they smiled at whatever they could, because they could feel the smile growing on each other without having to look, and there were many things worth sharing a smile over. In this they shared the way they had done from the untouched eyes of their childhood.
One day, death came to them together. It was to be no other way, and it spread a small smile across both their faces. “Ah, are we to get up now?” One said to the other, for they had not risen in many days. Death now looked and said “Yes, it’s time to get up.” And one of them nodded and eased slowly back up: “I guess it’s time to start walking again.” The other nodded and stood up as well, struggling, but with the determined sense of duty. And they waited to see where they were to go next. Death gestured and they nodded with that same sense of duty. But for once they glanced at each other, as if sensing that perhaps they were not sure which way to go. And they realized then that in fact they knew which way they were to go, but it was not the same way it was two different ways that did not lead in the same direction, that did not have any clear intersection or consummation point, and that did not reveal one to the other. They were both exciting, and both promised something new and necessary, but they were different just as in the end they were two different people. In all likelihood there were many other paths between or around each other’s, and their two paths were no more connected than the rest. They looked at each other for one long moment, and they saw in each other’s eyes the same sudden recognition of an uncountable number of ghosts that had held hands down a long and singular path. But in front of them lay even longer paths, perhaps infinitely long, in which old ghosts may disappear or be lost along the way. It was unknown, and as much as they felt the last remaining heat linger in the space between their old bodies, they could sense too the excitement for whatever was unknown down the next path. They knew that it was time, and it was so whether they wanted it or not. And they both did. It was the final thing they could share between them, and they felt certain that they should never see each other again. They could sense death waiting to lead them down separate roads and so they let go of each other without a goodbye for they, in all their careful understanding of the other, knew that their spirits were already directed to the next step. So they went on, and once their memories and consciousness had left them completely, their past faded too, and the state of being alone passed away. So we, sitting alone in our own world, have very much forgotten where once we were and where next we will be.