Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
“Pooh?” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw.
“I just wanted to be sure of you.”
A . A . MILNE, THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER
Seth had been pissy all morning. He’d been up into the wee hours the night before—or so he claimed—and wasn’t “into putting up with any bullshit today.” I rolled my eyes. We were in the middle of an argument we seemed to have frequently that summer. He insisted that he was the only one who could paint the peak of the latticework over the third story. Oh, for God’s sake. This was so totally like him, I thought. I was perfectly capable of painting it myself, but, as usual, I backed off. The argument was not worth the energy.
Up the ladder went Seth. Up the ladder with a very small bucket of paint balanced on one arm and a two-inch trim brush in the other—bounding to the top rung like the overwrought lunatic that he was. I, standing at the base, held the ladder steady and shouted up to him whenever it seemed he had missed a spot—which was often.
In order to reach the peak of the lattice, Seth—short as he was—had to stand on tiptoe on the last rung of the ladder and strain to reach the highest point of the spindle that stretched up into the blue Massachusetts sky.
Anyone who knew Seth could have predicted what would happen next. His foot got tired and, as he readjusted, he lost his balance. The small bucket of New England Barn Red paint jostled briefly against the house, and then—wobbling in a bigger arc—tipped over entirely. The contents of the bucket ran, oozed, and slimed their way slowly down the freshly painted front of the house—a crimson racing stripe on the pristine Clapham Beige exterior.
“Shit,” said Seth.
Once he got his balance, Seth stepped a few rungs down the ladder and surveyed the damage. We both looked for a long minute—first at the house, and then, wide-eyed, at one another. Seth began to creep down the ladder like a cat. Partway down he stopped and leaned in to the ladder, catching his breath. And then, gazing once more at his handiwork, he burst out laughing.
“You’re gonna fucking well clean the whole thing up,” I called out to him in my sternest boss voice. “Goddamn it, Seth.”
Then, beneath my breath, “Asshole.”
Seth scurried down the remainder of the rungs as deftly as he’d scurried up, but he was now undone with laughter. To make matters worse, and to prove that he wasn’t taking any of it seriously, he ran directly toward me, tackled me to the ground, and started tickling me relentlessly.
“Fucking get off me, you dick,” I yelled, but now only halfheartedly. (We were only nineteen. Work could turn into play at the slightest provocation.) Seth’s laughter was contagious. The house was now, after all, ridiculous—a piece of performance art in the middle of staid faculty row.
Seth and I rolled around on the newly mown grass, struggling with each other and pausing occasionally for belly laughs. Seth was stronger than I (he was a championship wrestler at UMass) but, remarkably, I sometimes held my own in these impromptu matches—a fact which he really could not bear. I don’t think I ever told Seth how much I loved these wrestling matches. I enjoyed how much my strength surprised and irritated him. I’d grown up with an older brother—also a college wrestler—with whom I frequently sparred, and always, in those earlier days, lost. But apparently I’d learned some moves.
Seth and I both heard it at the same time: A car coming up the drive. Professor Maynard was arriving home from his meeting.
“Damn,” I said under my breath. “Here he comes.”
Too late: The racing stripe. The laughing fit. The ladder now balanced precariously against the professor’s Victorian detailing. The Barn Red and Clapham Beige—all-too obsessively chosen by the professor over the course of several agonizing weeks of, as he called them, “color trials”—now oozing together.
The impeccably slicked professor stood for a long moment and surveyed the scene while Seth and I picked one another up off the ground and stood together, speechless, trying not to laugh. The rest of the crew—Mike, Jimbo, and Juancito—had run around from the old carriage house, where they were finishing up the trim, and stood at the edge of the action like a Greek chorus.
“Clean it up,” he said after a long look. Then he walked stiffly into the house.
No sense of humor on the guy.
Later that day he fired us.
His wife (younger, prettier, more fun) rehired us two days later, calling initially to apologize for her husband, and then, in a strange turn of events, begging for our return to the job. “I’ll deal with you boys from now on,” she said. “Carl will be too busy with his classes.”
We never laid eyes on “Carl” again.
2
That night we got the crew together in the woods near the lake, as usual. We built a fire. Drank beer. And told the story of the day over and over again to ourselves—embroidering liberally as we went.
First, I insisted that the group hear my version, which stressed the inevitability of the event—given Seth’s moodiness and the probability that he was still wrecked from the night before. Next, Seth claimed the floor for an extended telling of his version, which stressed the exhilaration of the experience—and the satisfaction of giving the obsessive professor his due. The story grew to legendary proportions over the course of the summer, as Seth worked and reworked his telling of it into an art form. By September, it was unrecognizable.
At least once a week, deep in our beer, some member of the crew called for it: “Seth, tell the racing stripe story again.”
But that first night after the event, as I remember it, we stayed later than usual in the woods. All five of us slept curled up in our sleeping bags near the waning fire.
As I think back on that long day, and indeed on that entire summer, it is surrounded in a golden glow. Have I romanticized it? Most likely. But even at the time, I vaguely sensed that I was living more fully than I had ever lived before. To this hour, I remember certain details so distinctly: the deep green of summer; the tropical scent of the suntan lotion we wore; the bronze of our skin, speckled with droplets of paint; the views of western Massachusetts’ majestic Pioneer Valley from gabled rooftops.
But I would never then—as I do now—have seen that summer as a time of intense spiritual growth. I would more likely have called it simply a fantastic season of play. Nor did I have the remotest understanding of the precarious nature of the challenges I was facing that summer—the many ways things could have gone wrong, the fork in the road I was almost unwittingly taking.
Only now, with the perspective of decades, can I see what was going on under the surface of that summer’s play, can I see that I came out of it a different person, can I see the beginnings in me of an actual adult, and can I see that that summer of growing up was almost entirely about Seth.
4
Seth was an altogether new kind of friend for me. Why did he feel so familiar—as if I’d always known him? Why did I feel safe with him, safe in a way I’d never felt before? Why did I prefer his company to everyone else’s? How was it that everything was absolutely okay if we were just hanging out?
Life with Seth was almost always fun—or at least intense. Our friendship bridged a divide that seemed to exist for me with every other person in the world—a divide I didn’t even know existed until I met Seth. Sometimes his mere presence—and whatever magic happened between us—made me feel wild, unshackled from my WASP restraint, reckless, the risk taker I had never been.
With the perspective of time, I can see that I felt compelled to know Seth. That’s all. Simply, to know him. In fact, to know everything about him. And I urgently wanted him to know me.
Was I falling in love? Yes, of course I was. But not at all in the way that we usually mean that phrase. Indeed, the idea of “falling in love” never crossed my mind that summer. If there was sexual attraction, it never became conscious. It was buried under another even more powerful form of attraction—a deep ardency in friendship that I had never before experienced.
What was this exotic new animal?
It was simply this: a best friend.
5
Best friends. What are they?
By this point in our young lives (ah, adolescence!), we have hopefully experienced some “good enough” moments of attunement, alignment, and resonance in our relationships with containers. Most importantly, as I have said, we have had the experience of feeling safely held and soothed, and feeling felt. We have laid the groundwork for some new magic.
Then, with the best friend—with Seth—comes something new: Not only do I feel felt by Seth, but I feel him. And he feels felt. And I feel him feeling felt. This is, for an adolescent, something altogether revelatory: A symmetrical relationship. This intense new form of relationship will call forth entirely new parts of our self. And once we fully experience these parts, we will never be the same.
How does this happen?
Well, throughout our childhood and adolescence, we have had fascinations with others—fascinations, I mean, with peers. And occasionally, but not often, this other with whom we are fascinated is also fascinated with us. Now the magic really begins. We have found a friend who wants to know us. Who needs to know us. Who seems, amazingly, as interested in our story as we are in his.
Whatever we call it, this new kind of intensely reciprocal relationship is an engrossing experience. We feel almost mystically drawn to this important new other. There is some new kind of exchange here—a heady new exchange of energy and information.
Philosophers, poets, and writers have studied this kind of friendship since pretty much forever, I suppose, because it is one of the most powerful experiences in human life. Plato. Gibran. Shakespeare. The Buddha. Kabir. The authors of the Bhagavad Gita. Of the Bible. To a one, these writers and thinkers have understood that “best friends” are a launching pad for our highest spiritual aspirations.
The Buddha, when asked by his own best friend, Ananda, if friends are an important part of the spiritual life, replied, “They are not just a part of the spiritual life, Ananda. They are the whole of the spiritual life.”
Today, unfortunately, we all too often tend to miss the profundity of these friendships. We might say laughingly—and with some slight edge of embarrassment—that Seth and I were having a “bromance.” Cool. Something to laugh about. As if it weren’t one of the most important things in the world.
6
Dr. Heinz Kohut called the magic of what I was experiencing with Seth “twinship.” This term is incisive. It goes right to the heart of the matter. The essence of twinship, Kohut tells us over and over again, is the deep human need to experience the essential likeness of an important other.
The essential likeness. Kohut emphasizes the main point: twinship is the discovery at depth of another human being who seems to have remarkably similar insides to our own. This very similarity raises the possibility that we could be known. Heretofore, a part of us has been—has seemed, has felt—to some extent incognito, cut off, unknowable by “the other.” Now, the discovery of inner sameness helps us to feel safe in a new way. We are not alone. How wonderful it is to find that there is another of our exact species on the planet. And in our own neighborhood! We have a friend in the world who knows who we are. (Cosmologists early in the twentieth century used to say that we cannot truly understand the universe because there is apparently only one of them—only one universe, that is. It turns out that, in the view of these cosmologists, it is impossible to have any perspective at all on any creation of which there is only one iteration. So too, human beings. In other words: I could not understand myself without Seth.)
At its core, then, twinship signals a deep new sense of belonging to the human race. Twinship is the very embryo—the earliest seed—of what most spiritual traditions call “oneness,” or “union.” Hinduism’s great spiritual masterpiece, the Bhagavad Gita, calls this “the vision of sameness.” Another great spiritual classic, the two-thousand-year-old Yoga Sutra, says, “We are all made of the same stuff.” Whatever we call it, most spiritual traditions see the mature experience of sameness as one of the highest forms of human consciousness. It presages the discovery that all human beings are essentially alike in every way that really counts.
And it all begins with that first truly reciprocal friendship. That first experience of sameness.
7
Have you had a twinship experience? If you have, you will never forget it. True experiences of twinship are precious, and we only experience them a handful of times throughout life—if we’re lucky. I remember my father’s best friend, Phil Shipe—the football coach at the College of Wooster, where my father was a dean. Phil and my father hung out together; they played golf; they watched sports on TV; they had deep talks about philosophy and politics; they had late-into-the-night talks about college politics. I remember, as a kid, observing this friendship with fascination. It seemed so very important to Dad. Phil gave my father a copy of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet with an inscription: “To my best friend, Bob. A pearl of great price.”
Best friend. It’s such a loaded phrase. Do you remember the first time that you dared acknowledge to another human being that he or she was your best friend? That moment is just as terrifying, and just as wonderful, as the first time you say “I love you” to someone.
But have you noticed? “Best friend” is a phrase from a sacred language that we all seem to know. We all know well enough not to abuse it, don’t we? Those of us who have no problem taking the Lord’s name in vain will not take these five words in vain: “You are my best friend.” I guarantee it. Indeed, I will wager that most often the truth of best friendship is so deep, so sublime, that it cannot even really be spoken.
By the end of our first summer together, Seth and I might have called each other “blood brothers.” We might well have taken out a pocketknife and sliced our fingers open and shared blood and sworn allegiance: Best friends forever!
We did not slice fingers, by the way. But we nonetheless knew in our hearts what was happening.
The need for twinship will be with us for life. But if you think about your own history of twinship, I think you will see that such friendships will arise most urgently for us during times of deep reorganization of self. And, of course, adolescence stands as the first of these experiences of reorganization and reinvention. And so, for most of us, adolescence will be the crucible par excellence of twinship, and inevitably the model for later times of twinship and self-reorganization.
To begin our look at this new kind of friendship, then, let’s start with an experience of twinship in adolescence. Do you remember what it was like for you? That first experience of twinship?
9
As I have said: I was nineteen years old. I was a sophomore at Amherst College—an elite New England men’s school, where I was struggling to belong. It was an uphill climb for me. I was a closeted gay boy in a time before gay liberation. I was a scholarship student. I was from an unsophisticated Ohio family and way out of my depth in this most sophisticated of schools. I was, in truth, a hayseed.
My freshman year had been rough. I was terrified much of the time. The other boys were so much more mature than I that they might just as well have been from another universe. This is not an exaggeration. They had been better prepared at elite boarding schools with exotic names like Groton and Deerfield and Choate. They were much more experienced at sex (or pretended to be). They were better at sports. They were, for God’s sake, mature enough to be cynical.
After my difficult freshman year, I dragged my ass home to Ohio for the summer. I was discouraged, but relieved to be home where I was still a king (or at least a prince)—as opposed to a complete nobody. My father gave me a blistering lecture about my grades. (I’d been an all-A student in small-town Ohio, but a B and, ack! C student during my first year at Amherst.) His face was red while he sputtered it out: “Why even send you to such an expensive school if you’re going to disappoint us. What the hell are you doing up there?”
I was not beaten. There was a quiet, steely core in me that was not about to give up. I got a construction job for the summer. I lifted weights secretly in the basement of a neighbor’s house where no one would see me. I worked carefully on my wardrobe. (I could be preppie, too, couldn’t I? How hard could it be? I wrapped the fronts of my penny loafers in white athletic tape. I ripped my sweatshirts just so. I sent away to LL Bean for sweaters.) I toughened myself up—wrestling hard with my brother and our big mutt of a dog, Brutus. I jogged at night when I wasn’t working my second job.
I came back for sophomore year more ready: tanned, healthy, and an inch taller (true) than I’d been a year earlier. And remarkably, by the end of sophomore year, I was in love with everything Amherst. I was beginning to wake up to the magic of college.
Toward the end of sophomore year, I decided to spend the coming summer working in Amherst. What was the point in going back to Ohio? (Ohio was “nowhere,” I told a friend, my mind perhaps inevitably tainted for a short time by the too-oft-imagined “superiority of Amherst men.”) I knew I had to help my parents out by contributing to the next year’s tuition, and that I would need to work all summer wherever I was. So, I rented a room in a dorm at the college. The plan for the summer: Paint faculty houses. (I had had lots of experience with this during high school.) My brainstorm: I would create my own crew. Solicit my own painting jobs. Save a bundle of money to help with my tuition, and be free of the dreaded parental supervision.
Step One: Put an ad in the local paper.
Seth was the first one to respond to my ad. We met on the steps of Johnson Chapel, Amherst’s white-columned landmark on the hill. My enthusiasm had tanked, though, when I first saw Seth springing up the steps toward the chapel. This Seth guy was a little, wiry dude. Actually, a very little dude. Maybe five feet one? This concerned me. Was he big enough? We would be painting enormous three-story Victorian houses, and lifting serious ladders. I needed strong, agile guys for my team.
Okay, Seth was short. But he was clearly strong. (On that first morning, he had his sleeves rolled up—most likely so that I could see his impressive biceps.) Also—and this was no small thing as I remember it—Seth was stunningly beautiful. He had lustrous chestnut hair pulled back in a ponytail. No beard at all. Smooth, white skin. Refined features. A high brow, and penetrating brown eyes. He looked in many ways younger than his nineteen years. He was a varsity wrestler at UMass, where he was studying English and Irish literature.
On the spot—trying to “own” my inner crew leader—I asked Seth to show me how he moved a ladder. We went around to the back of the dorm where I’d stored my biggest ladder.
Hmmm. His moves were impressive.
After that first half hour together, it was a done deal. I asked Seth to join me. I soon found out that what Seth had told me that day on the steps of Johnson Chapel was true: the guy was a tireless worker. (I was, too, by the way—trained to work hard by the world-class ballbuster whom you’ll meet in the coming chapters on The Noble Adversary.) And I had rarely met anyone with the sheer hunger for physical work that I had. Seth was my match.
Seth was from a working-class family. I mean a truly hardscrabble family. His father—a sporadically employed electrician—had wanted Seth to skip college and join him in his business. But Seth was having none of that. He loved literature. And poetry. And luckily for him, he had had one of those fabled high school teachers (think Marie Souvestre) who had changed his life. At first, Seth was opaque with me about his home life. But it all quickly seeped out. Mother: sick, beaten, chronically depressed. Father: alcoholic, rage-oholic, ne’er-do-well sadist.
Much later in the summer, it became clear to me that Seth had probably only survived his high school days by writing stories—writing adventure stories. Seth loved stories. Especially stories about travel, about adventure and escape. I soon discovered that Seth was, in fact, a truly world-class storyteller. The guy just spun yarns by instinct.
One final and completely winning attribute of Seth’s: He had a dog. A dog named Yeats, whom he cherished above all things. A feisty, loveable West Highland white terrier with a huge personality, who effortlessly owned the name of Ireland’s greatest poet.
Over the next two weeks, a dozen other guys showed up for interviews. Three made the cut: two other guys from UMass—Juancito (we called him “Cito”) and Jim, and one older guy from American International College in Springfield, Mike, another Irish lad.
Throughout the spring, I had advertised widely, and had a whole list of faculty houses under contract to paint that summer. The list began with my skiing coach at Amherst, Coach Rastas, whose house I had worked on briefly the fall before. Coach was well known in the Five College area—Smith College, Mount Holyoke, UMass, Hampshire, and Amherst—and he had had given me terrific references.
My business cards for that summer popped up a couple of years ago in an old file: College Pro Painters—Experience, Excellence and Reliability. And in that same file I found the sign that I had affixed to the side of my car. Again: College Pro Painters. A dorky name, said Mike. No matter. Within a week, someone had written over it with magic marker: Smart Ass Painters. I left the revised sign on the car all summer long. It got us more attention.
The crew tooled around town in the mammoth black 1963 Chrysler Newport that my father had given me at the beginning of my sophomore year. Jimbo called it the Queen Mary. The Queen came equipped with a fashionable oblong steering wheel (anyone remember those?) and push-button gears. It floated about a foot and a half off the ground, and one was never sure if the tires were even in contact with the road. It had an enormous Naugahyde backseat (no seat belts)—and a trunk that went on for days. Mike and Cito and I jerry-rigged a rack on the roof to carry the ladders.
Our voyages around the Five College area that summer became the stuff of legend—all five of us packed together, complete with ladders, gear, and Yeats, hanging out the window, yapping with unfettered glee.
10
The five of us settled into our work for the summer—and quite happily at first. In those first few weeks, we were exhilarated to be out in the sunshine, to be free of school, free of parents, and leading our own quasi-adult lives. To this day, I have flashbacks of that summer—and particularly of the first month of our work together. It was June. And it was a spectacularly beautiful month in the Pioneer Valley. As a crew, as a tribe, we were savoring the whole thing as a splendid adventure.
But in retrospect, I can see that there was a deeper form of fun happening for me, a form of fun of which I wasn’t even really aware at the time. It revolved, of course, around Seth.
Seth had quickly become the de facto co-captain of the crew, in part because he was so very competent at the work, and in part because, from the start, I enjoyed collaborating with him—talking over the jobs, managing the estimates, buying supplies, creating timelines for the team. Seth could meet me—and even exceed me—at almost every level. He had way more street smarts than I did (did I have any at all?), and he was stronger and faster. From the first, it seemed we had both wanted to put our best foot forward with one another. There was competition, yes. But there was also some deep level of comfort. Experiencing this comfort level was thrilling. And altogether new for me.
11
One memory from that first month is particularly strong, and illustrative of our almost inexorably deepening connection. The memory is still vivid in my mind almost forty years later.
It was a normal day of work. The crew was preoccupied with various tasks around Coach Rastas’s house. It was ten o’clock or so in the morning, and we’d already been at work for two hours. Seth and I were sitting side by side on planking supported by two big ladders, painting the broad and uninterrupted side of Coach’s barn. It was a beautiful afternoon. The sun was shining warm on our bare skin. From where we sat, we looked out over a mature apple orchard, with the purple outline of the Holyoke Range in the distance.
Seth and I sat in absolute silence for long stretches. The slow back and forth movement of the brushes on the clapboards was rhythmic and soothing. We moved often, but as one unit. Lifting and moving. Lifting and moving. Ladders and brushes. Placing the planks. Preparing the paint. It was a kind of elaborate dance that we both did well—and that we did together, without any rehearsal. We were remarkably attuned to one another.
Seth and I often sat together like this, with our own thoughts. And as we got deeper into that first month, this became a daily pleasure for me. In fact, these quiet times became my favorite parts of the day. I felt strangely soothed and calmed by these periods of silent collaborative work.
But on the particular day in question, the whole thing went deeper. To this day, I remember the feeling in my body. As I ran the brush back and forth on the freshly scraped clapboards, I had a vivid memory. It was a memory of something I had completely forgotten until that moment, when it returned to me like a dream.
In the memory, I was a little boy of four years old or so, sitting on the beach at my family’s summer cottage on Lake Ontario. It was a clear, beautiful day. The sand was warm on my small legs. I had a little blue shovel and matching pail in my hands, and I was carefully constructing a sand castle by rhythmically filling and emptying the blue bucket. Nearby sat my mother, glamorous in her one-piece pink bathing suit. She was sitting with a friend, chatting happily. She was young. Elegant. Laughing. At ease.
I felt utterly safe there in the sand. Soothed by the sun and the presence of my mother so nearby. I could hear her voice—and that was comforting. But she was not focused on me. I was free to drift and play in my own mind, in my own body.
This flash from the past was almost more than a memory. It was, indeed, a kind of reexperiencing—a deep body-memory. I relived the scene intensely as I worked alongside Seth. He was just two or three feet away (as my mother had been that day on the beach.) I felt soothed. Calmed. Reassured by the proximity of another being whom I trusted. At the same time, I felt exhilarated with the freedom and space to drift in my own thoughts, my own being. The memory of the childhood experience and the current-day experience with Seth melded together somehow, as if they had now become one experience.
Only now, so many years later, do I realize what was happening there on the plank with Seth. I was experiencing the deep joy of being alone in the presence of a trusted other.
12
Why was this moment so important to me? Because the connection with Seth had reignited a deep developmental need that had not been met for me as a child. I had not drunk deeply enough of this experience. It was not something my mother had been able to regularly supply for me—at least to the extent that I needed it. I was hungry for it.
And what, exactly, is this need? Our friend D. W. Winnicott looked deeply into this mystery, naturally.
The very capacity to be alone, he said, is based on the experience of being alone in the presence of a trusted other. In fact, without enough of this experience, says Winnicott, the capacity to be alone simply cannot develop. To actually experience being alone, one must know and be sure of the safe, containing, and non-abandoning presence of “the other.” (“I just want to be sure of you,” said Pooh, as he sidled up to Piglet.) One must have drunk deeply of the presence of the other.
Psychologist Anna Stothart describes the process beautifully, as it unfolds in the most ideal conditions between mother and child: “Because of the mother’s thoughtfulness—her capacity to convey to the child the state of being thought about, the child feels free to be alone, to think his own thoughts. He is in a space where he is alone and yet not alone. The mother is absent as object, but there as the unnoticed. She is the containing environment within which the child is playing . . . The child is actually able to experience the other’s absence as a continued presence within . . . This provides the infant [the child, the adult] with a space for discovering his own personal life and his own internal environment.”
In this space, says Winnicott—a space that is much like relaxing, like daydreaming, or like playing—the infant is able to become both integrated (unified, “put together”) and at the same time unintegrated. Both integrated and unintegrated. This is absolutely key to the infant’s growing sense of “realness.”
And why is the unintegration side of this equation so important? Writes Winnicott: because of the infant’s absolute trust in the presence of the mother “the infant is able to become unintegrated, to flounder, to be in a state in which there is no orientation, to be able to exist for a time without being either a reactor to an external impingement or an active person with a direction of interest or movement. . . . In the course of time, there arrives a sensation or an impulse. In this setting the sensation or impulse will feel real and be truly a personal experience.”
As an adult now, looking back, I begin to fully comprehend a stunning insight: the experience of solitude—the experience of actually being alone—involves, in fact, a profound kind of sharing. Indeed, it is only made possible by an early experience of the deep and invisible presence of the trusted other. Drifting and gliding inside one’s own subjective world—the world of the body, of sensations, of thoughts, and of feelings—is one of the most sublime forms of play. And through it, we have a deep connection to our own internal environment, which gradually becomes our own subjective, inner world—our unique and idiosyncratic personal life. And our trusted “other”—in the earlier case, Mom, and now Seth—is the unacknowledged co-author of this experience.
Seth and I found a multitude of forms of play that summer. But I never told him the whole truth about this: these quiet moments of unacknowledged side-by-side communion were by far my favorite. In those intimate moments, working silently next to Seth, everything was getting subtly reorganized inside me. I had no idea, really, what deep inner transformations were under way. I only knew that in those quiet moments with Seth, wonderful things—memories, visions, fantasies—would bubble up in my mind, bubble up to the surface from someplace endlessly deep and precious: the memory of Mom by my side; of Grandma; of Grandma’s holding arms, and her beautiful eyes; of the warm beach, and the lapping of the waters of Lake Ontario. It was a sheer bodily happiness that I had rarely felt.
My growing trust in Seth was giving me a chance to rework my capacity to be alone—which, as I have said, we only learn in the presence of the “trusted other.” This, I now understand, is one of the great gifts of twinship. This first deep friendship allows us a more conscious recapitulation of those important—and unfinished—early relationship experiences.
Twinships, then—best friendships—reignite the unmet needs of earlier relationships, and also, in the best cases, offer the possibility of healing, repair, and restoration.
14
I had no idea—in those early weeks—how deeply I was wading into a relationship with Seth that I did not understand at all. I had no idea how it could turn dark. I saw no storm clouds on the horizon.
But the storm would come—and sooner than I could have imagined. These storms, too, are an essential part of twinship.