I AM YOU, YOU ARE ME

I am the Big Bang, the beginning of everything in the universe. You are a cloud of dust searching for the form in which to be born. I shake everything and break it into pieces; you gather everything and give it form. I am the star born after the Big Bang. You are life, searching for its home. I am the bacterium born in the water. You are the water—life itself. I am the light and the warmth without which you cannot live. You are life, the reason I am here. I am evolution. You are multiplication and love. I am the planet on which life overflows with forms, imagination and beauty. You are the one who created this beauty.

I am the Creator who made man from clay and then, from his own rib, made him a companion. You are the serpent who tempted Eve with the apple. I am Adam, who needed Eve so that he would not experience the pain of creation alone. I am Cain and Abel. I am betrayal. You are faithfulness. I am the fear of separation. You are courage, the certainty that there is always another chance. I am pain and suffering. You are the caress, the tenderness and the mercy.

I am the one you did not want to leave. You are the one who let me leave because you were afraid. I am the one who was ready to break her chains to be with you. You are the one who did not want to break his own chains for me. I am the one who was ready to fly even while shackled. You were the slave who did not dare to be free for me. I am the one who left in order to set you free. You are the one who suffered in silence and in secret.

I was the end of myself. He was the beginning. He turned water into wine. He walked on water. He was everything when nothing else remained. He was the caress, the kindness and the mercy. He was with me when you refused to be. He was the promise. He is gravity.

I am the man sitting opposite you, sipping his coffee and wistfully watching the woman across from him. I am the woman sitting opposite the man with the coffee, unable to take her eyes off him, trying to hypnotise him forever. I am the one whom the waves relentlessly draw towards you. You are the honey. You are the forbidden fruit.

I listen to your confession and feel that this role does not suit me. My profession suddenly feels false because it puts barriers between us. But the waves know no barriers. They always bring us together. You are the one who trusts my profession and reveals your past to me. You are the one who tells me the story of your heart and asks me how to bear it. You are the one who believes in me. I am the one who is afraid of his own weakness whenever you are near.

It is my duty to teach you how to be strong, to show you the way. Yet in your presence I become the weak one, the small one, the mistaken one. I am the one who has found a new god in you. You are the one who is strong and irresistible. You are the energy that I need in order to believe in my God and in the doctrine I preach to others.

I am the fall. You are the rising. I am the sin. You are the forgiveness. I am the one who runs away from you, who hides from you, who tries to imprison the waves. You are the one who gently breaks the chains and frees me. I am the one who obediently follows you. You are the one who lifts me up and places me on a pedestal.

He is the Creator who has a plan for us—a plan for love, suffering and repentance. A plan in which we are all one, in the same place and at the same time, but playing different roles. I am you. You are me. He is us. We are Him. He is love. We are the suffering that is meant to lift us, to change us and to teach us to understand love—the love of the body and the love of the soul.

I was weak, so I loved you with my body. You had suffered, so you loved me with yours. He wanted us to pass through all this so that we might learn how to touch one another and then love with our souls.

I am the child who will be born in sin. You are the woman who will give birth to me in sin. I am the child who will never see you because you will have to pay your debt for loving with your body.

I am the priest who buried his beloved yesterday and now no longer knows whether he is the right person to teach others to believe in God. You are me—the beloved of the priest who died from love because he is love.

I am the child who seeks answers, furious because He took my mother away. I am not love. I am sin, anger, pain and suffering. I search for love and cannot find it. I am broken into pieces. I am doomed. Yet I am alive. I carry life within me, and He commands me to continue it. He already has a plan for that.

Then He sends me to you. You sit opposite me, sipping coffee and trying to keep your hair from being carried away by the wind. The wind quickens the waves. And together we fly upon them, absorbed in the creation of the world.

The suffering is sweet and brief because He has a plan for you. You carry away the life I sowed within you in another direction, and I shall never see you again. I shall never see myself, born of you.

I am here, but in my mind I am with you. I want to touch your body, but I cannot find it. So I love you with my heart. It knows your coordinates. It knows how to find you. It finds you and locks you inside its small chamber. And there you remain forever. Within myself I gather both suffering and love. I cannot separate them because together they make me whole.

I am life. You are death. I am the beginning after the end. I am a cloud of dust searching for the form in which to be born again.

(Elena S. Lyubenova)