YOU CAN’T HAVEdeath without birth. The Ancient Egyptians believed that before creation, there was only unity—no death, no birth, no light, no darkness, no earth, no sky. Just an undifferentiated oneness, into which something had to be carved.
Atum was the androgynous creator god. His name literally meansAll.The Coffin Texts say that Atum created the first male/female pair. He masturbated into existence Shu—the luminous space between sky and earth, and spat out Tefnut—the divine moisture. In Middle Egyptian, the wordhandis feminine, so the male Atum has a feminine element of himself that he uses to fashion the world.
It’s because of this belief that Egyptian religion uses the concept of syncretism. Two deities who appear as separate gods in temples can be taken back a generation, before they split. Amun-Re is the hidden Amun and his visible form, Re, together. You start with a unified whole, and then as time passes, you differentiate and organize and divide. Creation, by definition, is separation. Moving forward means being split apart.
This is what I think about, when I can’t fall asleep at night. When I stare at Brian across the table and try to remember who I married.
—
Time is a construct. Our brains take eighty milliseconds to process information, did you know that? Anyone who tells you to live in the here and now is a liar. By the time you pin the present down, it’s already the past.
If you had asked me back then where we would be ten years later, I would have laughed and asked why, when we had today? I would not have admitted to you, to anyone, that every now and then when I lifted my head from your shoulder and peered into the future, I could imagine you, and me, but not us.
I guess that’s the part no one ever tells you. You can love someone so much your teeth ache, so much that it feels like he is carrying your heart in his own rib cage, but none of it matters if you can’t find a practical way to be together. It’s like learning that you would be immortal if you could breathe nitrogen, but knowing you are bound to the oxygen of Earth.
I was the meteor that crashed into your life when you were already living it. I didn’t have any more control over my landing than you did when you froze, looking up at the inevitable sky. You had a past and a plan and responsibilities. You had someone who already loved you. We were gasoline poured onto fire. With you I burned twice as high and hot.
This is why you and I could never have stayed together. We would have consumed each other until there was nothing left.
When I met the man I would eventually marry, I almost blinked and overlooked him. He was quiet and thoughtful and steady and sure, all the things you weren’t.This is boring,I thought at first.Where are the bursts of color? Why doesn’t he talk over me when I’m talking because we have so much to say?When you’re used to flying, it’s hard to walk with your feet on the ground. But the strangest thing happened. Moving so deliberately, I noticed things I never had before: the way he never backed out of a parking spot unless my seatbelt was fastened; the way he asked before he kissed me, as if what I had to give was not his to take; how, when I got appendicitis, he was more worried about me than I was about myself. How he would order food that he knew I wanted, instead of his favorite meal. How he charged my phone daily, when I forgot to plug it in. How, when he held my hand, I didn’t just feel things. I felt everything. He wasn’t staid and slow. He was steady. When I stopped careening between the highs and lows of emotion, I didn’t feel bored. I felt safe.
For a while I was angry at you, because I had almost missed this—someone I didn’t just want to be with, but someone I wanted to be more like. You were the bright shiny thing at the corner of my consciousness. I made myself look away.
—
KIERAN IS SObusy as a neurosurgery resident that weeks at a time go by without my seeing him, and yet, I know him so thoroughly that the minute we meet up at Saks in Copley Square, I see something is wrong. I also know he can’t talk about it without getting more agitated. “I don’t understand why you need a suit,” I say casually, as we wander through the store, fingering cashmere blazers as soft as a dream and shirts so fine they slip through my hand.
“Because I can’t present my research at a conference in scrubs,” Kieran says. He glances at a price tag and goes pale. “That’s more than I make in a month.”
“I thought neurosurgeons were rolling in dough.”
“Residents aren’t.”
He’s fidgeting, the way he used to when he was younger and nervous—when he had to take his SATs or when he finally came out to me. So I do what I used to do—I grab his hand and squeeze once, like a pulse. I wait for him to squeeze back. We keep this little heartbeat between us.
If I ever needed proof that I had made the right decision to stay in Boston after my mother’s death, instead of going back to Egypt, all I had to do was think of Kieran. He excelled as a student, he went to Harvard undergrad and then Harvard Medical School; he was a resident at Mass General; and now, he’d been invited to present his research—aneurysmal therapy using retrievable Guglielmi detachable coils—at age twenty-eight. I know what a big deal this is for him. But I want to just smooth back his hair, like I used to when he had a fever, and tell him he can breathe.
“Hey,” I say now, softly, “you’re going to be great.”
He looks at me with my mother’s eyes. He nods and swallows, but his fingers are still clenched in mine.
“You could wear a burlap sack,” I tell him. “No one is going to even notice what your tie looks like, once you open your mouth.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Kieran mutters. “You’re not the one being judged. I know my shit, but I don’t know if I can explain it to a whole auditorium full of people.”
“You teach med students all the time.”
“In groups of five. Not five hundred.”
“Imagine them in their underwear,” I suggest.
“The med students?” he says. “The ones I know don’t wear any, because they have no time to do laundry.”
He is joking, but his pulse is still racing. It’s my job to read a human body, to see how close it is to crisis.
“Are you going to tell me what’s really wrong?”
He stops wandering through the racks. “What if this is it? I’ve been number one in my class. Twice. I got the match I wanted. Everything’s gone according to plan. Doesn’t it seem like it’s time for me to take a stupendous fall?” He drops his head. “It’s a big deal to be asked to present research this early in my career. Maybe I shouldn’t have said yes.”
