"Once upon a time, people were not born seperately from each other. They were born entwined, kind of coupled with each other. There were boys attached to boys, girls attached to girls and, of course, boys and girls together in a wonderfully intimate ball. We had eight limbs. There were four on top, four on the bottom, and you didn't have to walk if you didn't want to. You could roll, and roll we did. We rolled backwards and we rolled forwards, achieving fantastic speeds that gave us a kind of courage.

The courage swelled to pride. The pride became arrogance. Then we decided that we were greater than the gods and we tried to roll up to heaven and take over heaven. The gods alarm struck back. Zeus in his fury hurled down lightning bolts and strucked everyone in two, into perfect halves. All of a sudden, couples who had been warm and tight and wedged together were now detached and alone and lost and desperate and losing the will to live.

The gods seeing what they had done, worried that humans might not survive or even multiply again. Of course, they needed humans to make sacrifices and pay attention to them, so the gods decided on a few repairs. Instead of heads facing backwards or out, they would rotate our heads back forward. They pulled our skin taut and knotted it at the belly button. Genetalia was moved to the front, so if we wanted to we could.

Most important, they left us with a memory. It was a longing for that original other half of ourselves --the boy or the girl who used to make us whole. That longing is still so deep in all of us, men for men, women for women, men for women, for each other, that it has been in humans to travel the world, looking for our other half. When one of us meets another, we recognize each other right away. We just know this. We're lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy. We won't get out of each other's sight even for a moment. These are people who pass their whole lives together. If you ask them, they could not explain what they desire of each other. They just do."