The Couple That Lives in Your Ribcage

there are two uninvited tenants squatting in the basement of your psyche, and they’ve been subletting from you since puberty.

He shows up wearing whatever costume your culture told you a man must never take off: steel jaw, desert boots, a pilot’s license for reality itself. She arrives in whatever perfume your culture forbade you to want: red shoes, forbidden laughter, the exact curve of hip that makes priests write new commandments at 3 a.m. They call him the Animus. They call her the Anima. I call them the cosmic married couple who got divorced at the Big Bang and have been trying to crash each other’s dreams ever since.He tells you women are chaos and oceans and must be navigated with charts, compasses, and a firm grip on the wheel. She tells you men are towers and laws and must be climbed barefoot at midnight with a mouthful of thunder. Both of them are half-right and completely drunk on their own propaganda.The joke—the big, howling, cosmic belly-laugh—is that they aren’t visitors. They’re the missing halves of the ticket you tore in two the day you agreed to be born with a gender. You threw one half away and spent the rest of your life trying to buy it back at the movies, in bedrooms, in wars, in poetry, in every damn swipe-right that felt like déjà vu.Every time you fall in love with someone impossible, that’s just the Anima or Animus slipping you a forged passport so you can sneak across your own border for one night. Every time you hate someone for no reason, same smugglers, different direction.The desert sage in the goldfish bowl knew this. That’s why he grew tentacles below the waterline and kept the cigarette burning: the feminine ocean inside the masculine tower, the masculine fire inside the feminine depths. The lotus and the serpents at the bottom are the original divorce papers, still biting their own tails because neither side ever learned how to sign “the end.”Here’s the punchline, delivered straight to the solar plexus:One day the walls between the apartments get thin enough. He takes off the boots. She kicks off the shoes. They meet in the hallway that was always there, look at each other without the usual propaganda, and recognize the face they’ve been wearing to masquerade parties for thirty thousand years.Then they laugh so hard the building shakes, walk back into you arm in arm, and refuse to pay rent ever again.After that, strangers start telling you your eyes look different. Lovers stop feeling like border crossings and start feeling like coming home to a house that finally has all the lights on.Until then, keep the glass polished. The couple’s almost done arguing.And when you hear furniture moving in the walls at 3 a.m., don’t call an exorcist.Just leave two cigarettes on the sill and tiptoe away.They’re negotiating the reunion, and the paperwork is hilarious.