There are two things in this world that can surmount any obstacle ever created.
The first of these is love.
Our capacity to love creates in us a drive and purpose that goes beyond survival. We do insane and superhuman things in the name of love, things that would not be possible under any other circumstances. Tiny women lift wrecked cars off their injured husbands. Men carry their wives through ten miles of snow to get them to a hospital. Parents sacrifice their lives for their children.
Such is the power of love.
But there is another force that is just as powerful as love.
Human intelligence.
We will never know who first discovered how to make fire, but that act sparked a revolution. It expanded our minds, giving us the power to shape the world around us. What seemed impossible became possible. Jungles could be turned into fertile farmlands, mountains could be ground down into blocks of stone to build grand towers and high walls.
With the power of our intelligence we conquered diseases, tamed nature, walked on the Moon, and sent our likeness on a golden disk to the edge of our solar system and beyond.
And when love and intelligence collide, truly impossible things can happen.
Having an eidetic memory has been a boon for most of my life.
The ability to store and recall anything is the dream of every school child, because with that gift, exams become nothing to fear, largely a mindless exercise in easy recall.
It was so simple for me, when I hit the age where standardised testing began.
For the other children, the concept of ‘one hundred percent’ seemed some sort of mythic uncertainty; a shibboleth signifying unattainable success. For me it was a constant – a variable as certain as my memory.
They pushed me ahead in school until it became clear that I had both a perfect memory and a stupendously high IQ. Then, with very little discussion and even less warning, I was shipped off to university at the tender age of fourteen, where older, wiser students gawped at the child in their midst who still wore pigtails and Rainbow Brite sneakers.
I may have been embarrassed by my youth and lack of worldliness, but they were more embarrassed by being academically trounced by someone who still had braces on her teeth and sparkles on her backpack.
Eventually I finished my first degree, then a second, then my third. By the time I was twenty-five I had a post-doctoral fellowship, was lecturing classes under tenure, and had received a special research grant.
But better than all the academic success in the world, I was in love.
It would do a disservice to my lover to lavish praises on her character and beauty. When you are truly, mindlessly, besotted with someone, a heady haze of your own bias surrounds them, buffing away every flaw until they shine like the most precious stone in existence.
Thoughts of her warm, soft skin consumed my mind during the day, and I longed for the nights, to be with her, inhaling the dusky natural perfumes of her body and listening to her chatter about her day at work.
