Eve.

What can I say of her? She was a fireball. She was a mountain. She was a meteor shower. She was an explosion. She was rainfall. She was lightning. She was a storm. She was a tornado. She was an earthquake. She was a tiger. She was a lion. She was a falcon. She was starlight. She was moonlight. She was the sun. She was warm earth. She was the wind.

She was sudden. She was kind. She was broken. She was wild. She was soft. She was brittle. She was everything and I was not enough.

It is not fair to say that. To say “I was not enough.” To say that I was not enough for her, who loved me. Who taught me the love against which all other emotions are measured. To give me the lenses through which I have learned to see the world.

She is sharp edges. She is soft focus. I filter the world through eyes that are forever changed after having seen her.

Eve. I do not believe those Bible stories any more. I do not believe that we were cast out of paradise because of her temptation. I believe we owe everything to her. If not for her curiosity, where would we be? If she had not followed her desire to know something more than what she already knew. Would we know happiness? We would only know the warm liquid contentment of going nowhere, of being nowhere, of the time before birth.

So we come screaming wildly into this world. Our lungs were not made for breathing fluid for too long. We grow.

Eve. She must have stretched out of the womb with a yawn. I can imagine her, tiny, entering this world with a scream that everyone thought was a cry but which was really a call, an announcement that she had arrived, that she was there and ready and hungry for everything that was to come.

I was not so much like her. When I entered this world, my cry was truly a cry. The unfamiliar air. The leaving of that warm and quiet place. I was not so ready. I was not so willing. I was not calling out to the world to show me everything at once.

And then she came, and there was an awakening. This quiet world erupted in symphonies of magic. Magic fell from her fingertips. Trails of magic glittered behind her as she walked down the street. As fast as she went, she could not help but lose some of her faerie dust along the way. And I was less afraid.

Her courage was contagious. Some people are like this. Some people enter your life and bring with them a canvas of possibilities with which life may be painted. Some people bring with them the expectation that you are going to grasp a paintbrush and splatter this world with the colors that you want to see. Some people bring with them the utterly seductive feeling that anything is possible, that nothing is too far from reach, that no dreams are too large for us to reach for.

And we reached. We reached together. Her hand guiding mine. Our bodies coalesced. We became joined.

How does this happen? How does it ever happen?

Who was she? Who am I? Who will I be? She was indescribable. She was water. She was thirst. She was fruit. She was light. She was beyond reason. She was a flight. She was flight. She was everything. She was everywhere.

She took us. She took my hand, and we went.

She pulled and I went.

It is simple. It always more simple than we allow ourselves to believe. It is always more simple that our minds tell us. Our hearts always know that it is as easy as deciding. We are born with hearts that know how much is possible. The world presses forgetting down upon us. The world does not do this with malicious intent. The world attempts to do what all bodies attempt to do: to continue living. The world is not an enemy. The world is a collection of people, so many hearts, so many desires, all thundering at once so that it seems that there is a singular roar of what it wants. But that roar is a cacophony of different wants becoming trapped in the threshold of what can be. We press into each other as we try to get our desires through that door, fighting to come through intact. There is so much fear. So much fear that our dreams will remain dreams, floating in the night. So much fear that our dreams will never see daylight.

And so there is battle. There is fear of losing what we have, of what would think we would have had, of what we might have had.

With her, there was no battle. It melted away. She decided. I followed. It was simple.

It was, perhaps, seduction. Can it be called seduction when we are called to live? It was awakening.

She came. She entered my world and pulled me into hers. And I wandered inside it like a tourist. I allowed it to settle inside me.

We left our cold winters behind. She needed a climate that matched her spirit. Hot, unpredictable, always the same, always surprising.

We were not so young. We were much younger than our hearts. They were old. Hers was old. Hers was the heart of a sailor, an explorer, a hunter, hers was the heart of a someone who had lived for centuries and been thirsty to see and know for centuries. Hers was a heart that could not forget that it had lived before and had not yet discovered all the things it wanted to know. Hers was a heart that knew that it could not possibly know everything it wanted to know, and knew that it would continue seeking everything. Hers was a heart that knew that it was in seeking that our lives are lived.

Our hearts are older than we are. We are not bodies with souls, we are souls with bodies.

She had been born again into a body, but she had not forgotten. Her heart was not lulled into the sleep of forgetting. She was awakening walking.