The origin of love

When the earth was still flat and the clouds made of fire and mountains stretched up to the sky, sometimes higher, folks roamed the earth like big rolling kegs. They had two sets of arms. They had two sets of legs. They had two faces peering out of one giant head so they could watch all around them as they talked; while they read. And they never knew nothing of love.

It was before the origin of love and there were three sexes then. One that looked like two men glued up back to back, called the children of the sun, and similar in shape and girth were the children of the earth. They looked like two girls rolled up in one. And the children of the moon were like a fork shoved on a spoon. They were part sun, part earth, part daughter, part son.

Now the gods grew quite scared of our strength and defiance and Thor said,"I'm gonna kill them all with my hammer, like I killed the giants." And Zeus said, "No, you better let me use my lightening, like scissors,like I cut the legs off the whales and dinosaurs into lizards." Then he grabbed up some bolts and he let out a laugh and said, "I'll split them right down the middle. Gonna cut them right up in half." And then storm clouds gathered above into great balls of fire and then fire shot down from the sky in bolts, like shining blades of a knife, and it ripped right through the flesh of the children of the sun and the moon and the earth.

And some Indian god sewed the wound up into a hole, pulled it round to our belly to remind us of the price we pay, and Osiris and the gods of the Nile gathered up a big storm to blow a hurricane to scatter us away in a flood of wind and rain and a sea of tidal waves to wash us all away. And if we don't behave, they'll cut us down again and we'll be hopping round on one foot and looking through one eye.

Last time I saw you we had just split in two. You were looking at me. I was looking at you. You had a way so familiar but I could not recognize cause you had blood on your face and I had blood in my eyes. But I could swear by your expression that the pain down in your soul was the same as the one down in mine. That's the pain that cuts a straight line down through the heart.

We called it love. So we wrapped our arms around each other, trying to shove ourselves back together. We were making love. It was a cold dark evening, such a long time ago, when, by the mighty hand of Jove, it was the sad story of how we became lonely two-legged creatures. It's the story of the origin of love.

Stephen Trask