Post by Shell on Jun 9, 2006 12:47:52 GMT -5
“Do you love me?” your voice calm and spilling warmth. I could barely speak but you were wrapped around me and there was no escape from your loving gaze. Nor, in truth, did I wish to escape. I wanted you to hold me tighter, wanted to feel you all over me, leaving nowhere untouched, not a strand of hair nor a thought unkissed.
“They don’t understand, you know …” I whispered, already seeing the perceptions of others twist and turn, just before they turned to blank with barely disguised rejection and disapproval. “What matters is that we understand, don’t you think? Tell me how your heart feels right now, darling, tell me what your instincts whisper? Are they telling you that this is nothing? That this is meaningless? That I am nothing? That I mean … nothing to you? Can you imagine life without me? What would that feel like? Tell me …”
So I tried for a few moments to imagine life without you. It fell dark inside. I felt nerves and senses turn to concrete, drag me down as beat of heart slowed and stilled. I felt my stomach churn as I began slowfall into fearful ocean that would kill me because I was so heavy with this coldstone deadness. I would scream for help but there would be none. I was deaf anyway, even to my own voice. I would gasp for air but there would be none. Instead a wall of water would take me everdown, flooding lungs and the pain, although brief, would be excrutiating. Then I too would be as blank as the others. Statues on the floor of some god-forsaken underwater hell.
Ruefully I wondered if I might fit in at last, like that; unbreathing and unfeeling, but it couldn’t work. After the swallowing, there could be no welcome hugs, no party for the prodigal daughter’s return to normality because no-one would be able to move unless they actually felt something. The moment that they felt anything at all, they would rise from the ocean floor like buoyant pods and then, as they began slowdrift towards a distant surface, darkdust trailing wake behind their slow ascent, I would still be where I was, feeling nothing and alone again. But this time I would feel Really Alone. My heart could bear the vision no longer and I rose, swiftly, to the surface to enfold myself in your smile again. Tears parted waters dense with echoes of the ones who had already risen and the ones still coming down. Sun soothed my heart when I broke surface into glow of evening song falling onto starving senses aching from the void.
You smiled again. You were always smiling … at my fears, my tears, my joy when I held your latest gift, carefully placed, where you knew that I would find it. You never hid such gifts, just very, very carefully placed them so that I would always find them and know that you were close, watching where I went. In truth I knew you must have gone there before me, because you knew where I would be long before I did.
“Please don’t leave me, ever … I love you. I would die without you,” unashamed panic added overtones of unashamed squeak to my regained voice. “Yes you do … and yes, you would die, beloved one, but I could never leave you even if I tried … even if you died. To leave you would be to leave me too. Sometimes the distance is too painful even as it is … so now, don’t tell me, kiss me instead.”
*image: Claude Theberge
this, rrw! i guess in some ways you are right ... i was talking to my self. I was also trying to record a feeling, a moment of actual spiritual communion with someone dear to me but now passed over ... and trying to say some of the things he said to me in this life ... but in my own way ... about how doubt and denial of love makes empty statues of us all and how when you Know, you Know. Whatever shape or form a relationship assumes ... when people go into not-Love, that is Death. Does that make sense?
and 
all
time for me 
echoes, hope you all are doing well 
