"Like what?" she asked.

     "A, there is you," I say. "No one could be lovelier to behold. B, we are surrounded by a sea of flowers, a scene that would be hard to match even on Earth. C, we live in a micro-gravity world that makes one as light as an angel with white wings, afloat on a silver-white cloud. D, the whole world that surrounds us is bathed in a lovely pink light, matching the pink of lips, panties, and many other things."

     "Ah, but you're wrong on item, D," she said. "There are no panties, pink or otherwise. Why would a girl need them? Why should we emulate you boys, where it's a part of the package? We dance our own dance. We call our own tune, and if it is the heart that sings, then the melodies will always match the melodies of other hearts, and the freer the song becomes, the greater the joy will be."



     I agreed with this assessment.

     "Actually, you are wrong about the clouds too," says Jill a while later. "And you are wrong about the micro-gravity too, that you say is making the floor appear nine times softer. I think it is actually nine-and-a-half times softer, and the cloud is pink that I am floating on, and it has the number nine written on it in golden letters."

     "Is anything else wrong that I said?" I ask a while afterwards.

     "Actually no," she says. "No matter how hard I try, I can't think of any complaints. Can you?"

     "No!"

     "Yes, I do have a complaint," I said to her a long time later, breaking the silence. "The complaint is against myself."

     "Oh?"

     "When I took my heart in hand and dared to come after you, to say hallo, I wanted to say to you, thank you for being in the world. I have failed to say this. So here it is: Thank you Jill, for being a part of this Universe."

     "Oh, I think you have been saying this in more ways than you can imagine," she replies.

     "And you too," I add.

     "But you are right, we can't say it often enough," she says, and then she says it again with another hug and another kiss.

      And so the moments turned into hours.





     My love for Natalia was as if it stood centuries apart from my love for Jill, as if each one existed in a different sphere or time. Martin would have called this distinction an invalid concept as it contained a sense of separation. I realized that. I also realized that my love for each was actually the same in principle, though individual in expression. This glorious spark of an idea took away the division, separation, and any sense of isolation between Natalia and Jill. This wonderful multiplicity in unity quickly became almost a paradox for me that I nearly couldn't figure out, but eventually did. The paradox seemed related to an invalid concept. The concept of separation was invalid, while the concept of an all-embracing individuality was not. Its universality was uniting. We were all human beings and spectacular in our own way.

     Nevertheless, a trifle of the old notion remained. The idea of closeness was related to the concept of separation as negation. That concept too, had to be scrapped. The idea came that the concept of closeness can stand on its own as a manifest of our common humanity that we all share, which had rendered our human world so unspeakably rich. The challenge, thus, became one of letting go of even that, and to embrace the truth that there exists no principle for separation which would make this closeness appear special rather than normal and universal. Jill became intertwined with this endlessly challenging project that we had no intention to define a limit for.

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Stories about War from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche