Plato's hypothesis revisited

 

the phantom missing

we are born, and we grow up,

often as only halves of wholes

that need something to be added to be complete,

we need to find just who we are

by connecting to anorther,

I think of amputees

who still feel the missing limb,

it's like that,

the sense of something vital missing,

though you never had it before, except in your heart,

part of yourself, some addition that somehow

makes you even more "you"

then you have ever been before,

finding the glue that holds the love and joy within you

with the love and joy within another,

and actually makes you closer to who you ought to be,

I wish for every person to stumble into such a completing relationship,

this early morning, I feared I had lost my better half

when she fell in the night, coming back to bed,

I felt undone,

bereft of she who makes me more complete

than I could have imagined before we met

and then gloriously became a couple,

I am thankful that we are not yet cast asunder,

1 + 1 = 1, just more complete.

by Henry H. Walker

June 15, ‘26