What woman worth her femininity has ever told all of her story? As the gods do, we reveal ourselves - if we reveal ourselves at all - to whom we choose and in our own good time.
You see, I am not at all certain that I'd ever witnessed love. Before you and him. It's rare enough, you know. Certainly I'd never felt it - or even mistaken it - for myself. Even the thought of happiness terrifies me. Fragile as a blown rose. Why would anyone choose happiness over the long-enduring qualities of fear and pain? I've often wondered if fear and pain would die, too, if I'd only let them. If I would stop caring for them, fussing over them.
She's a woman. like a chameleon does, a woman quietly blends into all the parts of her life. Sometimes you can hardly tell she's there, she's so quiet going on about her business. Feed the baby. Muck the stables. Make soup from stones. Make a sheet into a dress. She doesn't count on destiny for anything. She knows it's her own hands, her own arms, her own thighs and breasts that have to do the work.
What do you suppose has changed in twenty-five years or so? I found the journal to be well written back then when someone or other left it behind. I thought it set things out rather nicely, addressing the events of the day, which are, of course, the same events of this day. Think of it. Even if its theater and its motives are being played out in a different geography, there's still war, isn't there? Still avidity and hate and violence and fear. Poverty and righteousness are still thriving. As are revolution and arrogance and lies. There is always perversion and torment, of course. What I particularly admired about this paper was the shrewd touch of pathos and poignancy strewn among the squalor and the filth. You know, The Good News...
Should nostalgia move me, I can view the nightly news broadcasts from Rome or Milan. As I might an old movie. But unlike when I watch an old movie, the news broadcasts leave me empty, angry, and I must tell myself yet again that one need tune in only once in a lifetime to the nightly news to know the chronic story of man. To know how wrong the world is. How wronged it is.
I fear that you will believe as we all believe that we can keep breaking into our store of time without counting. Our lives seem infinite until we reach in one day to find how little of them is left.
Too often it is we who won't let life be simple. Why must we squeeze it and bite it and slam it against what we've convinced ourselves are our great powers of reason? We violate the innocence of things in the name of rationality so we can wander about, uninterrupted, in our search for passion and sentiment. Let the inexplicable sit sacred.
I try to remember life without him and it's like trying to remember an old film I thought I'd seen but perhaps never did. I ask him if he's sorry we didn't find each other when we were young, and he says he would never have recognized me when he was young. And besides, he was too old when he was young, he says.
"I've missed you since I was fourteen," he says. "At least that's when I began to notice that I missed you. Maybe it was even earlier. Why did you wait so long to come to me?"
A thousand days. A minute. A flash. Just like life I think. I hear her whisper: Take my hand and grow young with me; don't rush, don't sleep; be a beginner; weave pearls in your hair; grow potatoes; light the candles; keep the fire; dare to love someone; tell yourself the truth; stay inside the rapture.
