‘Awakening,’ ‘conversion,’ ‘enlightenment’ — these are all words for seemingly esoteric phenomena that exist in the realm of saints and mystics, which few ordinary people, even modern contemplatives, even respected teachers, feel they have the right to claim to have truly experienced. For one thing, to do so would seem at best haughty and at worst completely nuts.

Yet, the fairly common experience of falling in love shares all the hallmarks of an enlightenment. It is an overwhelming, radical shift in perspective, which seems to come from the outside — unprovoked, undeserved, a grace, a gift. It happens rapidly, changing everything in its wake, challenging one’s deepest assumptions about the world and one’s place in it, most particularly the assumption that one is essentially alone, disconnected from others in a fundamental way, separated from God.

Every aspect of living is touched by it. The lover’s mental and physical processes are changed, and the shift is quite visible to everyone who interacts with the affected person.

When asked to describe what has happened — how, overnight, the lover seems to have departed her usual, mundane existence for one in which laughter and coincidences rain down upon her with such force that it is hard to see anything at all that does not appear to be drenched in beauty, and yet, at the same time, she has not truly left her old world at all, but is actually more fully immersed in it — all but the most sensitive among us are left at a loss, clinging at lyrics from love songs and sappy poetry and cliched adages that can only capture some tiny fraction of the sensation.

Just like the mystic, the lover will be asked such questions as: How did you know it was really God/love? How did you know this was the Real Thing, and not just a delusion? What makes this experience different from all the other, looney, short-lived obsessions you’ve had? Can you please tell me how you provoked this, what caused this thing to happen to you? What can I do to make it happen to me? How can I be happy? How will I spot it when it comes, will I hear it, the small voice whispering to me in the night, saying I’m the one you’ve been looking for?

And oh, oh, how the lover would like to say — is dying to say.

But she finds that she cannot.

This wisdom is not to be known intellectually. It is beyond rationality, beyond logic, beyond proof. It is to be seen, felt, experienced. It cannot be owned. It cannot be attained by grasping. It cannot be found by looking.

You do not need to worry, says the grandmother deep inside your chest: when it happens to you, and it will happen to you, you will know. You cannot fail to notice.

You will find yourself, my child, someday, looking into the eyes of someone who had only weeks ago, days ago, seconds ago, been a stranger, and seeing in those eyes your own future, as clear and recognizable as your reflection in a mirror.

You will ask this person, do you remember what it was like, weeks ago, days ago, seconds ago, before we had ever met? And this person, this other person, will reply, No, I don’t.

You will not remember either.

* * *

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you, reader, without whom I could not exist. My life depends critically on yours, and so I offer you this advice:

The next time you find yourself standing at the edge of an abyss — unable to see the bottom and yet sure you will lose everything you hold dearest in the fall, certain that you ought to be terrified and yet still, somehow, inexplicably, drawn forward — do not hesitate. Jump.

Expectation. Forgive me.

I miss you when you are gone, and when you are near I miss you in anticipation of your next departure. There is no such thing as closeness. Objects can be no closer than they are, co-arisen and inseparable. Everything interpenetrates and yet I long to be penetrated, as if something is missing, as if something is lost. Who am I, if you do not know me? You ask me to write the answer on your face, yet you insist that it must be spoken, it must be in words. For a moment, before you explained your request, I thought you had understood. You said, with your air, or, with your breath, but all you meant was talking. You just wanted me to talk, as if that might bridge the gap. Oh, you do not know me, and I cannot tell you, it would only prove me right. What do you know without words? I am touching you and you are writing words on a screen. You are transmitting thoughts to someone else and you are not totally here. I leave and wonder when you will notice my absence. This is the only reason I leave you, so that maybe you will experience the lack of me, as I experience the lack of you. No matter how close I pull you, even into my very body, I lack you.

We stood on a cliff looking out over the edge of the world. It is so big, I say. It is so still, you say. Back in the town we had touched the leather horse things, and you said, they are made for something so much more powerful than we are, and you said, they are made so well, better than anything for people. And I touched them all with my hands, bridles and halters and bits and saddles. Oh September. The saddles the blankets the crops. Neither of us has ridden a horse. We will talk of the trips we have taken. I will tell you to buy a certain toy for a child I do not know. I hope that child is me. Once, you bought black shoes with white lightening bolts on them. I do not care for shoes because my feet are so big. You put metal to glass with duct tape. You remind me of my father.

My father called me, thinking I was thousands of miles from where I am. I have not returned the call. They say that fathers who have been absent ought to write to their daughters and apologize, even if it is the only thing they can do, even if their daughters will never forgive them or even acknowledge them. This, God bless him, my father has always done.

I want a long dress; I want a knife; I want a baby. We talk of Henry Miller, of his honesty, and the air is so light at the edge of the world, and so many of the trails are unauthorized. Why don’t we worship our ancestors here, you ask. In my family, we do, I say. And in another world I am writing to a stranger about how Georgia is like Russia and already I have nostalgia for the future I might share with the person I would tell this to, the person who might understand. You shove your arms in a heap of manure to see how warm it is on the inside — the people give you a look.

I can feel it all through me, the future we will not act out, the future we have already had, the future we have shared from the beginning. There was never a beginning, there was never. There was the edge of the world. It was so large. It was so still. And the birds on the rocks were sensitive, and the waves were sensitive, and the eyes that saw it all were sensitive.

It was simple: I loved someone and I wanted them to know it.

I would take you with me. I would take you into the hole in the center of my chest where I do not exist, have never existed, the laughter of permeability, the air. I would take you where I cannot go myself. God, this pain is exquisite, and your face, I write on your face, I take you on my life boat, I die in your arms as you change from a boy to an old man and back again, over and over. You are a completely different person. You are a mirror. I want to walk to the edge of the world with your DNA in my body.

These photos are of me and Jenny Sunshine during a visit to my grandparents’ farm in Georgia. We were about 17 years old (thus my terrible skin), and at that point had been friends for three years, ever since we’d met online in 1997. We loved each other. Not just ordinary friend-love, but the kind of love where you write one another long letters and talk every day and get often fiercely jealous/hurt about everything and cry because you think she doesn’t love you back as much as you love her and you think you’re cut from the same fabric and that no one else will ever understand you like that but you’re sad because you can’t ever seem to find the words to tell her. She was the first person in my life I felt that way about, with the possible exception of my mother. I had had other friends, even best friends, before, but not like that, not in that obsessive way. She was my first love, my first real kiss, the first person who ever made me feel that if I could only have her, I wouldn’t need anyone else.

We’ve been friends for 14 years now, and we’ve gone through it all. Fights, rivalry, jealously, possessiveness, depression, more depression, paralyzing depression, anxiety, not talking, being goth, feminism, fundamentalism, conversion, going off to college, leaving college, going back to college, getting boyfriends, ignoring one another too much because we had boyfriends, having boyfriends do horrible things, doing horrible things, not knowing what to say or do to help, living together, moving, living apart, missing one another, getting tired of one another, not knowing what to do with our lives, problems with our families, deaths in our families, horrible breakups, broken engagements, birth mothers revealed, infidelity, cyber stalking, academic woes, career woes, love woes, becoming adults woes, everything. And that’s how I know I will always love her. Even if she’s a fancy corporate lawyer now and I’m *still* trying to figure out how to be an artist and scientist at the same time, and sometimes it seems like our paths and personalities, which seemed so similar when we were young, have become quite different in some ways, we’re still the same people we were when we first met, when we were 14 and 15, in a chatroom for teenagers who were searching for something that they couldn’t find anywhere else. And those kinds of friendships never, ever die.

I wish that there was more written about this particular kind of love between teenaged girls. I know I’m not the only person to have experienced it. I wouldn’t call it the same as the love I experienced (with/for men) in later relationships, but then again I would not call any two of those relationships the same either. But it was certainly not without both passion and desire on my part, especially in those early days. Like any long relationship, it has changed a lot over time.