I woke up on my left. On my outstretched arm rested a head of big curly hair, asleep. Hanan.

I’d been told, on an evening ice-cream trip only some time ago, that I wasn’t supposed to see that head of hair, normally hidden in her hijab. In Hanan’s religion, hair is a woman’s intimate jewel, forbidden for anyone to see except the husband. And yet here we were, past a winding path of mental concessions and negotiations, in this moment, on this bed. Morning light from the windows behind us softly lit the scene.

Like so many times before, I was waking up next to this curly head. Even once would be a privilege. What a blessing to be waking up again and again next to this rare person with such a big heart.

It was a weekend. A last wave of sleep was rolling in, wanting to draw me back under for some more minutes, and I could probably give in. I closed my eyes. My logical conscious and hypnagogical unconscious made contact, and in that twilight zone they birthed a thought.

Why do I wake up every day as myself? Suppose sleep is when the personal soul is sucked back into the edgeless silence of the one unified soul. When you return from it, you could become anyone, right? Why then do I return, every morning, to the same body and mind? The self is such a frustratingly persistent isolation. Wake up, remember that I am Neel, remember the other times waking up as Neel, remember my projects I’m procrastinating on, see Hanan, fleeting thought about our future, then all my other memories and visions and problems. Every time.

What if instead, on the way back from the big soul, I wake up as Hanan? One soul flitting back and forth between two mindbodies as they are trying to journey deeper into love? Is that too much to ask? Does that cross some forbidden boundary? Is love only wanting to become one with each other, but vanishes if we succeed? If I did wake up as Hanan, how would it be to see me from her eyes? Would I be able to bear seeing myself with so much love and intimacy and promise?

And with that last half-articulated wonder, my mind began to give itself up to the dark of sleep. The final image I saw before the black took everything, was a distant white light approaching, in the shape of a vertical eye. Did someone once say that that’s what a soul looks like?

As my mind was trickling back, I still remember that last dream picture I saw: a white vertical eye that receded slowly into the dark. It doesn’t really mean anything.

My brain was still downloading. Who am I? I’m Hanan. Ah yes, Hanan, life is hard and heavy.

I open my eyes. I’m on my right, my head on Neel’s arm. Oh yes, this guy.

As my brain re-downloads my life in these first seconds of awakening, I realize anew, like yesterday and the day before, that this has been an interesting chapter of my life because of Neel. He is interesting in the ways you can explain, like his life and views and interests. But there’s something ungraspable there, unspeakable. Neel cannot quite be explained by anything he has come from or appears to contain. There is a living unpredictability, an electricity from outer space, that he knows not fully himself.

I watch his sleeping face and iridescent blue earrings in silence for some more time before our day will begin.

I know that he wants to spend his life with me. And he doesn’t know, that I know, that that is not to be. Neel lives in a dream world without constraints, and I live in the real world with people and expectations. In that world he has appeared quietly as an anomaly, and he must disappear as quietly.

Ah, my mind. Within a minute of waking, its neurotic narrative engine is already at full speed. That one time when walking down the rock steps to see the mossy waterfall, he turned back to catch me talking to myself, and it was so embarrassing.

Neel keeps saying though that our minds are very similar, that we think the same things. I’m not sure about that, and I’ve told him so. He says this from knowing only the parts of my mind that I share with him. He’s a child. Despite his confidence in his own intelligence and maturity, there are some parts of me that he is not ready to know yet.

I asked him the other day when we were smoking in my car, what does he think about when he wakes up every day or goes to work or takes an evening stroll? He tried to answer, but I can’t get the full picture. I haven’t told him, I wish sometimes that I could teleport into him, see what it’s like to see the world from his eyes, think the world with his thoughts, live in the world with this extraterrestrial energy that I cannot grasp. That energy is an entity, something that will do anything before being controlled. It scares me.

But I have also fallen in love with it. It projects a fearless laser-like path into the future. Where does an argumentative atheist get such unshakeable faith in life and destiny?

My head hurts. It’s too much to think all this, the words are getting heavy again and the images blurry. How would it be, if, as I let sleep take me this time, I do teleport into him? I would never have to tell him that which I wish I’d never have to tell him, he’d simply understand why. But there is no such thing, in this plane of reality. If only life were that easy. No, Hanan. It’s just Hanan and Hanan, over and over again, for you. There is no such thing.

And with that, I think, the darkness of sleep took what remained.