I don’t envision my soul as being inside my body, but more as being all of the huge empty spaces between atoms and stars everywhere. It’s closer together because, where the stars are in the universe, the gaps are in my soul. I don’t have anything the universe has and it doesn’t have anything I have. My soul is like the limit of a line in calculus, almost to two, but never quite there. There’s a hole at two. The line is discontinuous. The universe makes a graph by plotting points. One of the points is two. Together, we are complete.

    Finding and recognizing the points in the universe that fill my most pressing gaps is very difficult. Other people exist to help each other find the gaps. Reality is relative to where you are standing and two people can’t be in the same place at once. We are all seeing fractionally different universes, so we have different gaps. It is rather like the way scientists put together protein primary structures from fragments of the polypeptide chain. I have Ala-Cys-Try-Bet and you have Cys-Try-Bet-Lua-Chow, so the grand polypeptide might be Ala-Cys-Try-Bet-Lua-Chow. Then again, it might not be. There are look-alike repetitions, even if no two points are the same. We try to find and match up with people with similar views of the world to us, trying to fill in the gaps.

    By similar views, I mean perspectives on the world, not specific interests or opinions. Ways of thinking are what end up similar. I mean that I dance and one of my friends draws. Another plays the piano and yet another writes plays. My brother plays video games. That is not Laura Chapin important. Those are just interests, not methods of thinking and living. By no means do we think alike, but we are close enough to understand most of what our friends try to say. If I continue with my protein structure analogy, then our interests would be things that fit in our active sites, remembering that we each have infinite souls and therefore infinite active sites to bind to, build-up, break-down, and change substrates (stimuli).

    This seems a lot like my friend Leslie’s name for the moments the universe is made of, ki!. (That’s pronounced like key with the emphasis on the ee) The ki! are stacked in infinitely large stacks to make up time. Once a ki! is passed, though, it can never come again. With souls, you have a memory, but, looking back, things are never the same. When I have ideas like this one that take many words to explain and don’t have proper names, I make up a symbol for them. I don’t use English alphabet letters because I do not want any similar wording to prejudice people about the idea. My symbol for these fragmented amino acid-like nouns is . They are very important to understanding how I see other people.

    Theoretically, I have everything in common with everyone, or I would if I lived forever. The blessing is that we humans don’t live forever, not in this reality. All people are different from each other. With an infinite set of holes to choose from, the probability of two people having the same soul is not at all high. That makes finding people like myself exceptionally difficult, but no one has it any easier. It’s mainly luck and going to the effort of looking. It is worth it, that I know for sure.