The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

The only real, is Life!

Life sets consciousness free to choose no-form or infinite multiple trillions of forms, any form it can imagine.

My hand trembled and flashed, words tumbled over the blue-ruled lines of the paper.

Consciousness can forget itself, if it wants to forget. It can invent limits, begin fictions; it can pretend galaxies and universes and multiverses, black-holes white-holes big-bangs and steady-states, suns and planets, astral planes and physical. Whatever it imagines, it sees: war and peace, sickness and health, cruelty and kindness.

Consciousness can shape itself three-dimension into a waitress turned prophet of God; it can be a daisy, a spirit-guide, a biplane in a meadow; it can be an aviator just wakened from a dream, loving the smile of his wife asleep; it can be the kitten Dolly in mid-spring to the bed impatient where PLEASE is the catfood this morning?

And any instant it wants, it can remember who it is, it can

remember reality, it can remember Love. In that instant

, everything changes. . . .

Fluff-ball Dolly crouched, unseen blue eyes behind dust-chocolate mask, sprang, stunned that mouse-tail line of ink from my pen racing along, knocked it off the page.

"Dolly, no!" I whispered ferociously.

You don't feed me catfood? I'll eat your pen. . . .

"Dolly! No! Go on! Get!"

Not your pen? she glittered. I'll eat your HAND!

"Dolly!"

"What's going on, you two?" Leslie, wakened to the commotion, moved her fingers under the blanket. A hundredth of a second and the little creature whirled to attack, needle-teeth twenty claws rapidfire on the new threat to kittens.

"Dolly The Kittalorium is suggesting that we start the day," I sighed over the storm of battle.

Most of what I suddenly knew was safe in ink.

"Are you awake, yet, wook?" I said. "I had the most remarkable idea just now, and if you're awake I want to tell you . . ."

"Tell me." She fluffed a pillow under her head, avoiding a trouncing for that from Dolly on the sheer chance that Angel The Other Kitten walked innocent into the room at that moment, a new target for Dolly to stalk and pounce.

I read from the notebook just as I had written, the sentences bounding over each other, gazelles over high fences. In a minute I finished and looked up to her from the paper. "Years ago, I tried writing a letter to a younger me, Things I Wish I Knew When I Was You. If only we could hand THIS to the kids we were!"

"Wouldn't it be fun to sit on a cloud," she said, "and

watch them find a notebook from us, everything we've learned?"

"Be sad, in a way," I said.

"Why sad?"

"So much good, waiting to happen, and they can't find each other till now, or till five years ago. . . ."

"Let's tell them!" she said. "Put in the notebook, 'Now, Dick, you call Leslie Maria Parrish, she's just moved to Los Angeles, under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox, and her telephone number is CRestview six, two nine nine three.

"And what?" I said. "And tell him to say, 'This is your soulmate, calling'? Leslie was a little star already! Men saw her pictures and fell in love with her! Is she going to invite him to lunch, a kid about to run away from his only year in college?"

"If she's smart, she'll say let's get out of Hollywood fast!"

I sighed. "It would never work. He's got to join the Air Force and fly fighter planes, get married and divorced, unfold who he's starting to be and what he's starting to know. She's got to get her own marriage over and done, learn for herself about business and politics and power."

"Then let's get a letter off to her," she said. " 'Dear Leslie you'll be getting a call from Dick Bach, he's your soulmate so be nice to him, love him always. . . .' "