Sex, birth, marriage, these bodies, this life, they were all just representations of the power that had created them, the power now surging through my wife in this flood of matter, the power that had made us one: the power of love. Love, I saw now, was an exterior spiritual force that swept through our bodies in the symbolic forms of eros, then bound us materially, skin and bone, in the symbolic moment of birth. Everything we were, everything we were going through—it was all merely living metaphor. Only the love was real.
