Once upon a time, you would not have recognized us. People were not people but big fleshy boulders, with two sets each of hands and legs and fingers and toes, one head on top with two faces looking in opposite directions. It was not a pretty sight, these human balls, but they were happy, whole, rolling around wherever they pleased. If they found a long straight road, and especially if it started at a bit of an incline, they could get going so fast they could change the molecules in the air; they could burn the grass into crispy tendrils, turn sand into glass, melt rocks into magma.
The Sun is a man. His sons were hairier than the rest and slightly more muscular. They were stubborn and less adept at multitasking. They rumbled and belched when they rolled.
The Moon is a woman. Everyone knows this. When her daughters sang, the oceans moved. Their flesh was soft, and when they rolled they liked to know where they were going.
But the Earth, she is a fickle thing. He is full of tides and plates and seasons and volcanoes, the constant flow of water and earth, part Sun and part Moon, always. He is both male and female, and her offspring were the same—one face mustached and low-voiced, the other smooth with heart-shaped lips; two arms thick and tight, two arms long and graceful. You looked at one face and perhaps she was smiling, but then you turned her around and he was frowning on the other side. But the sadness was only shallow and soon passed. They did not know true sadness, for they were never alone.
We must not forget the gods and their jealous insecurities. We must not forget how power corrupts, how it craves itself, how it chases its tail like Ouroboros. There was something threatening about these eight-limbed creatures, something great and powerful. Their completeness was something even the gods didn’t have, and these children of flesh were prideful. They forgot their place. They thought they had a right to heaven.
This is the downside of being complete. Others want what you have. They covet your doneness.
So the gods, in their epic tantrum, threw thunderbolts and cut each ball right down the middle. Each cut was its own snowflake, a surgical fingerprint; no two were alike. The balls became sad crescents—the Moon only half full, the Sun eclipsed, the Earth with a big bite taken out of it. Those who once rolled so gracefully became wobbly upright creatures who had to learn how to walk on two legs like toddlers. They were stretched and turned like grotesque clay, their heads spun around to face forward, their gaping wound pulled shut and tied at the belly button. They were shaped like fleshy stars.
And so love was born. The once-complete creature became two incomplete halves. Out of the pain of being separated came the yearning to be whole, to be reunited with that single lonely creature whose jagged edges are an exact mirror image of our own.