Love is all you need
By Lyria Lin

This is my first essay so I hope it will make sense. It is about love.

I was reading email from someone in another multiple system who was upset because she had realized that she has romantic feelings for someone who is in her own system. I know it is not nice to laugh at people but I did laugh a little bit to myself. I felt like saying, how come it took you so long to fall in love with someone in your own system?

I have been in love with Lynn in my system for a long, long time. It goes back to the first time I saw her. I looked in the mirror and instead of seeing me, I saw her. She was covered in blood. Although I did not understand what happened to her, I knew that what she needed most was to be washed and cared for, so I washed off this body we share and went to lie down in the soft sheets.

Some time later we met again inside. I was following the cardinal's song down the path on a day when everything was special and new (a neural pathway I think JJ would call it) and I found her, sitting by some gates. She had a guard's room that opened out from the outside of the gates and also to the inside of the gates. This inside door, like the gates themselves, was always locked. The day I found her she was sitting outside looking at a tree. Oh, I knew she was that girl I saw in the mirror, but all grown up. She was wearing a dark black dress and a black skirt that fell to her ankles, and her hair was tied back in a silvery cord. She had a look of stone about her, but when she saw me, a tear came to her eyes.

"I thought you had just been a dream, or else a demoness," she said to me.

"Did I feel like a demoness?"

"Not my kind," she said. She reached out her hand and asked, "Are you really real?"

I touched her. Her skin was hot. "As real as you are," I said. When I touched her, she flinched, and then she pulled away. "Your touch is cool," she said, "You should leave before I consume you with fire."

There has always been something about my Lynn that is hard to describe, and at that moment it was very like the air just before it rains, when you can almost taste the storm coming. "I will go if you ask me to," I said, "But I will come back. I will always come to see if you are all right. I am glad to have found you." She did not answer, so I sat down under a tree and watched her. She is very good at saying nothing, my Lynn.

The night started to fall with the sun going down behind the trees. I saw her look from me to the sky and then back at the gates. "You should have gone already," she said, "for this is not a safe place at night."

"I can find my way," I said, and it was true. But she looked at me like I had lost my mind and said, "No. You'll have to come inside my room. But do not try to go behind the gates."

I did not want to go behind the gates. They resonated with a dark energy that even as I was then I knew not to touch. But I did want to see Lynn's room, and so I went in. It is up to her if she would like to tell about her room. There are some things too that are private between people, but I will say this, that she was achingly gentle and taught me many things. Later I taught her things too. And afterwards, she would always burn and beg me to do things which would hurt her, but I could not. Sometimes it would be bad enough that she would disappear behind the gates. But sometimes she would play for me - oh the music she can play - and we would sing songs and read poetry and she would be able to stay for a little while. I visited often... time is different there. Not enough to say that we would only be us together, and not so little that she would think I had forgotten to come.

This is how we loved, and it made a joining. I saw the gates and I saw some of the burning. She saw my cooler ways and some days she would come with me a ways along the path and I would show her the birds.

People think this lovemaking is like masturbation. Some silly people I guess. Do they really think that we were in a body when this happened? That shows what they think love is, an explosion of nerves. True outside lovemaking takes you into each other's selves, it does not just keep you at your nerves, although in outside love they join in the dance as well. I think this love of each other is like a love affair with a writer of poetry that you love. It is a natural way of reacting to truth and beauty.

Other people think it is narcissism, that it is like looking at your own reflection too long. It is true that Lynn and I sometimes have seen each other in the mirror, but to love her is not to stare at myself. If it were, we would not be a system. Yes, we are one in some things, like a body, but this oneness is both real and an illusion. Loving her is like loving a parent or a child, who come from the same line of blood. If I saw me in her, we would be integrated. I have wondered if because of our love we will ever integrate. I do not know. We are so very far apart. But if we did, it would be only love that would make it possible.

I think all kinds of love in a system is important. It is a marriage that can never be broken, a multiple system, and sometimes I think without passion inside a system it is even harder to get through the arguing, disbelieving times. In our system, I think that if I had not found Lynn's gates, she would not have found the birds and the way the trees grow. I think that we each know a little of the other has kept one or the other from vanishing even further back into the unknown reaches.

Of course the question is still who sent the cardinal. But I do not care really, I just am glad to love Lynn. Right now she has locked me from room, which is hard. But I still visit the gates to catch a glimpse of her.