spanda

I didn’t know it the night your breathing slowed

and mine did too without

either of us deciding

it should be this way

the nervous system knows before the mouth does.

it’s been taking notes in every room —

who’s safe,

where danger seems imminent,

which silences hold

and which ones wait to become something worse.

and then: the throat opens.

not the way you open a door

but the way a door you’d forgotten

turns out never to have been locked.

the chest follows.

then the belly.

then whatever it is that lives deeper than that,

the residence of decision.

I used to call it chemistry

Like we all do —

“we have such chemistry”

like it was something you either had

or were always going to be missing.

but chemistry implies a lab,

implies someone measuring,

implies the beaker is far more important than it is…

what it actually is

is two ecosystems

arriving somewhere

at the same time…

two instruments finally tuning to the same note —

not because they agreed to

but because the room got quiet enough to hear each other.

wetness doesn’t live in a single molecule of water.

music doesn’t live in a single note.

the field between us

didn’t live in you

or in me

or in the particular light that was happening

through the blinds that night —

though I’ll be honest,

I’ve thought about that light more than once.

the Sufis had a name for what arrives

when two people stop performing their separateness.

so did the tantrics.

so did the Kashmiri mystics

who called it spanda —

the divine pulse,

the trembling,

the sacred quiver of recognition

that moves through the field

when two people show up

at the same time

in the same body

with nothing left to protect.

I would have called it luck.

Time,

and understanding,

and clarity

have taught me it wasn’t luck.

it was your throat opening when mine did.

it was biology and evolution

and that thing —

older than language,

older than the particular disaster

of wanting someone

and not knowing how to say it,

older than all my best words

for all my worst feelings.

it was your nervous system recognizing my nervous system  

the way an animal recognizes

a storm is coming,

or that it is no longer alone in the dark —

not afraid of what’s there,

but changed by it.

Still changed.

forever changed.