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The air didn't feel as cold anymore as we walked, and the streets as eerily empty. "My friend's name is Erica. She is studying love," I added moments later before Helen could answer my question, breaking the silence.
"But your friend doesn't understand what love is," Helen replied. "She doesn't understand it in the way that you have just described it. I think, that is why she can't acknowledge it. I sense that you have the same problem. I sense a conflict in you, and you said so yourself. You are scared to accept the truth that you know is true. You are sacred that you will hurt you wife if you come with me to my apartment. You are also afraid that you hurt yourself by denying yourself the chance to explore what you had closed your mind to for almost your entire life, namely the truth that you have always known and never allowed yourself to acknowledge. But why should there be a conflict? Most people that I know struggle with this conflict, and are actually afraid to resolve it. Just look at yourself, you are a married man for a dozen years or more. But let me ask you this: When you put on that ring, did you stop being a human person with human feelings and a need to respond to these feelings? When you put on that ring, did you swear to isolate yourself from your innermost humanity that we all share, by which we are all united, which draws us all together into a single, universal humanity? Did you swear to close the door on all that? Obviously you haven't. Still, you treat yourself as if you had. You treat yourself badly. You treat yourself like a criminal. In a way you are a criminal. You are denying yourself and me, and the whole of humanity as human beings. That's a paradox, isn't it? I think your friend Erica doesn't understand a lot about that either, just like you. That it why you're both glad that you didn't get any closer. You couldn't. You didn't have a platform worked out where love can reign. Of course, you are also both sad about it. You embraced each other as two equal human beings, and you were glad about it, but than you rejected the very thing that you embraced, which is your common humanity? Why couldn't you treat each other as brother and sister, as you really are in the most profound sense? I think, that is what your friend doesn't understand, and neither do you."
I nodded but then shook my head. "I think she understands a lot about love," I said. "She has taught me a lot about myself."
"Except she fails to understand one thing," Helen interjected and shook her head slightly, too. "She has read the textbooks, Peter. She has studied love. But this is life! She said no, to life! She said no, no, no, to living in the realm of truth. She preferred clinging to a lie. That's not living, Peter, is it? So, what is missing, Peter? Tell me!"
I couldn't answer. I let us fall silent again. I hated that.
"You accepted a great responsibility with that ring," Helen continued, "and I am sure you're fulfilling it. But that shouldn't become so overbearing that it isolates you from the rest of humanity and from yourself, and builds a fence around you. To the contrary, you should see your marriage as but a first step towards embracing the universal marriage of the whole of mankind on the basis of our common humanity that we all share. It seems to me that you have been running backwards, away from that. But that doesn't accord with the principle of life and our humanity. Life isn't a catch-me-if-you can race in which a person becomes another's trophy. Life is wide, profound, beautiful, rich and exciting, if you allow it to unfold. We've got to become responsive to its principle, Peter."
Helen paused and sighed. "Why couldn't you and Erica do that? What principle don't you understand, Peter?"
"I think Erica is afraid of committing adultery," I replied, just to say something. "I think she would love to embrace life and love, and would love to do this as fully as possible, but she can't. In a way we are all a bit like that. It seems to me that she doesn't own herself. She doesn't respect her sovereignty as a human being. If she had, she wouldn't have hesitated to allow us to embrace one-another fully, to the fullest extend that love would have urged us to go."
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