There is nothing untrue about sunshine. He is this way. A life without shadows. Everything known, held. And loved. There is life in this kind of love. It is of light, warmth, home and hearth, of bread baking, a place of open windows and whispering candles. All as it is. Nothing as it is not. Just pure sunshine where clouds are clouds and rain is rain.
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He was coming home. Arriving by train. To see again what once walked, now carried, what should be walking, walking never more, of hands within wood and not upon it, of fences never mended, of grace not held, or spoken, or shared, to see the flag not flying, of patent leather shoes under granite faces, of woman in black not speaking, of men who had left their bibles at home under a coat of dust, and of children with wide eyes at rail and train and station. To see blue skies and hear nothing but my own thoughts and see nothing but dreams forever dreaming, forever stuck as death upon life, forever playing what was and what would never be. This is how Virgil arrived, or perhaps, of how I remembered it.
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As I age and I think of life, of what matters, of what we remember as important, I can’t help but think of holding and being held, in sunshine of course, but mostly against the darkness, when nothing pass your hand can be seen and all that can be heard is the beating of two hearts. As my days fade, too the memory, ever so faint, of his heart against mine and I wonder if what I remember now is simply the memory of a memory as I reach for coffee long grown cold in my absence. I harbor no bitterness and in this I marvel and wonder and in this way I see a shard of my difference, of a life I’ve lived alone and would gladly do again to have what we had, however brief, however fleeting.
3 comments:
The change in tense as well as the sentence fragments are intentional. I have edited some to make her thoughts more clear but fear to take it further lest what is "thought" becomes writing.
The last part of this post was particularly arresting. The tone/phrasing, from those very first words As I age and I think of life,, triggers an immediate flow of thought/of emotion, and I think that although each of us will admire Mary, and wonder how she could feel as she does, most would recognize and rightly so they would be as thankful. Beautiful use of language, engaging, lovely.
Sometimes I too wonder how Mary feels as she does and I wonder if her story is not the exploration of the edges of sanity, for Mary does not fit with the rest of society and her behavior seems so open to ridicule. I also find it interesting how a single encounter (Mary and Virgil) can so change a person as it did change Mary. Of course, the experience took place in the middle of war and it is hard to separate out what influenced what. In other words, her life like real life is nothing but a bloody mess of grayness.
As always, thanks for taking the time to stop, visit and leave a comment. Very, very much appreciated.
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