I chock this up to Mercury in Aquarius. Has to be because I was talking to the soldier on the phone last night… this type conversation and his voice kept breaking up…

“I don’t know why I am so slow,” I said. “I can’t figure it out. I am usually a fast thinker and just way out in front. I am years ahead. 10 years, 16 or 18 years ahead sometimes… I know this stuff very readily and these other things, I just can’t seem to parse. I mean I’m embarrassingly slow. I am apologetic about it. I feel I should apologize for being so slow, like jeez. I’m sorry. It’s years later and I am just catching to what you told me. I mean it, this happens all the time. I can grasp the intricate stuff very easily but then I am told something very uncomplicated and there are times I don’t understand the thing for 5 years. 5 years and I am at a loss to explain it! And this is one of those things. We talked about this in 2003… we’ve talked about it many times since and I just now today understand it properly and I just don’t know how that can be.”

“Well I think it’s just that you lack experience,” he said.

“Yeah? Explain that.”

“You think it’s pheromones. You think it’s pheromones between you and I and we do have them but it’s a minor part of it. You don’t seem to understand that if they took your soul and put it in another woman I would be attracted… I would be magnetically attracted and there would be nothing I could do about - pheromones be damned. Your soul is the magnet, I’m the steel that is attracted to it. If we get anywhere near each other we’re going to come together, nothing can get between us and stop it.”

I waited a few seconds, thinking. I was actually talking about something much larger but this was interesting too. “I acknowledge that. I mean it’s not like I don’t know… at least some of this. I don’t deny this. For example when you told me you’d considered calling me in the middle of your life… when you thought you were going to die?”

“Well I thought I was going to die and I wanted to see you one more time. But I didn’t do it because it would not have been right. I couldn’t do that to you,” he said.

“I know but when you told me that I told you I’d have come right to you. I’d have come immediately to where ever you were.”

“That’s what I figured. I thought that was exactly what you’d do and what I would do to but I was going to into combat and didn’t think I’d be coming back. What would that have done to you? Where would that have left you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know how to think about that. I’m just telling you, I’d have come to wherever you were, immediately and we’d have fallen right together I am sure. We have come together instantly just like normal.”

“Uh huh.”

“Okay, so that much I knew but what I did not comprehend until just today is the magnitude. Now it dawns on me.”

“Well you get things when you get them. P, you’re a magnet. You are my magnet and I am your steel.”

“Then let me ask you this. If that is so, how did we separate? How did we manage to get away from each other when we were kids?”

“We separated. You went one way, I went the other. We went to separate parts of town and we stayed there. We were far enough apart we could stay that way.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, I remember that. That’s what we did all right.”

“Yeah, we stayed far apart so the thing that happens when you put us together didn’t happen. Because when that steel sees that magnet, that’s all she wrote. And it’s our souls, P. It is our souls that are attracted not some damned pheromones.”

Walter Egan - Magnet and Steel