Forever January

I find that all this time I have loved my own personal Taj Mahal. It’s wonderfully beautiful, exotic. You find yourself speechless in its presence. Nothing compares to it, and nothing ever will. It is singular and unique.

And so you are my Taj Mahal. I admire you, love you, adore you, grow silent and breathless in your presence.

But at the end of the day, I must leave you where you stand; leave you to return to my other world where home is small, quaint, simple. I love both places but yours is forever intangible. I will always think of it with a wistful sigh in my heart, pine for it like a wolf baying at the moon, sometimes even dream about it.

But at the end of the day, no girl from Louisiana will ever live in the Taj Mahal. No wolf will ever call down the harvest moon. She must find happiness elsewhere: tangible, touchable happiness.

And so perhaps I have, but always will I love my Taj Mahal.

“Here, let me get that for you,” I say as I take the glass from his hands and fill it with water. A pair of deep-set, upturned hazel eyes gaze into places I cannot see as I turn around and press the glass back into his hands, my hand gently pointing his elbow in the direction of the kitchen table.

We sat there in that small kitchen, one of us in the light, the other in the dark. I asked him if he wanted something to eat. He says no. Silence. Finally he turns towards me, head tilted.

“It’s hard being like this, you know. Some days I don’t want to continue on. I feel like my world has been taken from me. But the last thing I remember …” His voice trails off as he looks upward, heaving a small sigh from his chest.

“It was last Februray, in New Orleans. The last thing I ever vividly remembering seeing was your hair before the blindness came completely. It was fire in the sun.” He takes a sip of water. More silence.

“Don’t ever stop being you,” he finally murmurs. “You’ll always be my fire in the sun.”

–

And this is my last memory of you, dear one, of our quiet moments together in that small pink kitchen which smelled of bleach and betrayal. You telling me you wished I was your daughter, that I should never change, that I was fire in the sun.

My mind has never beheld someone was beautiful as you, my heart not knowing any other soul that resonates such a deep, rich tone throughout my being. Years go by, seasons change, lovers change with the moon — and still I love you. Still I find myself every night wrapped in your arms, dreams so rich I never want to awake. Memories of your voice send warmth into my veins.

And I find myself content in this adoration for you, happy in this secret sort of love. I expound your graces to the stars, the moon, the rustle of the wind in the oak leaves.

You are a muse to my senses and I hope to have you be a part of my life for many seasons to come.

“It’s the bitterness,” I said quietly, grasping my cup of tea between my hands. “It’s like a black hole in my heart. It devours, destroys. It kills. And who could ever fathom escaping a black hole? Once it’s there, isn’t it there forever? Sucking and devouring, turning everything pulled towards that gaping maw into nothingness …

You’ve always purported turning Life’s lemons into lemonade was simple, but I’ll tell you this: you can’t turn lemons into lemonade if you never have sugar. Sugar is the key to all this. And Splenda, Equal, these things never suffice. It’s like putting a band-aid over a gushing aorta — you’re still going to bleed to death. The lemons will still be lemons.”

I sighed and looked up at the crescent moon hanging low in the sky, the stars glittering around it like lost diamonds in the night. “I feel as though I’m caught in a vicious cycle, you know? There’s no end in sight, no relief on the horizon. I want to be done. I want to be finished. I’m tired of swimming against the currents. Why not just let them win? Let them take me off into the dark oblivion? I hear the abyss is quiet … And maybe –maybe — there’s no bitterness there to plague my heart …”

“Take me home,” she whispered. “Please, please — take me home!” Her fingers dug into the bosom of the Earth as she pressed her face into the grass. “I’m not meant to be here, at this place. I’m too broken, too disarrayed. Please take me home, put me back where I came from, back in my sidereal world. This hurts.”

Crickets chirped into the night, stars glimmering in the black sky.

“I just want to go home. I’ve never been so broken and alone as I am right now …” Her voice trailed off into the wind. “Please, just take me back home …“

“There once were fireflies here,” she whispered quietly into the night, “in the summer. And the winter heavens were so filled with stars you felt surely the sky couldn’t hold another one, lest they all come tumbling down to the earth. And the springs were so full of butterflies, dancing from petal to petal.”

But now we’ve passed into the veil of darkness. We make Time twist our world into a macabre visage. Gone are the days of the firefly, of diamonds in the winter sky.

“And I do wonder,” she said, “if I will live to know of the last polar bear to sink into the sea, drowning in the Arctic waters, if I will gaze upon the sunset of this civilisation. I wonder, indeed …”

Lying in bed, I draw imaginary spiderwebs across the expanse of the ceiling and walls. Light glimmers through the windows as you move beside me in your sleep. I wonder quietly in the back of my mind how many more times in our life we’ll do this — spending our free moments together to keep the loneliness at bay — and how long will our strange, platonic relationship go on.

Sometimes I miss you, though I’ll never say it to your face. You say you’re leaving, moving away. I nod and turn my head.

I hope you find happiness out there — I wish you the best. I hope the unease in your heart settles, that your demons are burned away.

I keep my scepticisms to myself. They have no place here, right now, marring the end of our days together.

I force a smile as I sit up, greeting the morning with a private aubade in my mind.

An ending. I love and loathe endings, cherish and hate. I covet the dénouement, for in those last moments there exists an endless chain of unspoken possibilities — a renewal, a birth, a new glimmer of hope. And we as human beings cannot help but to race towards the light. It’s an ending in and of itself — but at the end, the light continues on forever. As human beings, we cannot help but to dream that we continue on with it.

Once upon a time, we were in the dark. So it began. And we found light, we raced with it, danced with it, lived in it. But as it began, so it ends.

In the dark.