When time stops you hear the raindrops sing. The distant past echos in your heart with the rhythm of melancholy. Like sapphire embedded in faded stone to be discovered by archaeologists in two thousand years, you etch this moment into the mesh of memories. Pictures frozen in time stirs your mind to the streets of Milan. Stairs steps sounds creak and creep in the background an auditory backdrop for the beautiful display of life in pictures.
When Christmas comes the absence of warmth becomes apparent. Streetlights now shine darkly into the ink of the night. And on the cobblestone streets of Italy a couple traces hearts in the fresh snow, her cold fingers writing I Love You. With humble brickwork and warm coffee his youth melts and holds that ephemeral snow in eternity. Faint markings carved into stone face boldly into the darkness of tomorrow. That life light wraps around the Christmas tree tracing lines across snowy Milan, giving each window a kiss and a graze of the cheek.
Sun kissed beaches and tepid bedsheets all sway under the weight of today, the creases of yesterday feathered away by the archaeologist’s brush, she breathes the air of the Romans. And the sands of Carthage comes rising in a storm of galloping horses stamping out human footprints. That path which led me to you–how tenuous it was, how miraculous we were both in this world at once.
When your soft breath whispers to me I love you, that acceptance of the deep currents of life, I understood it all, or so I had thought. The world was nothing more than an exchange of ideas and desires communicated by touch and mutual presence. What pairing would be more perfect, that out of the ruins of Rome I meet you, eyes glistening with watery beauty wishing and living life. Sweet grapes sing the song of your smile, the joy of seeing you.
Many nights humans endured, never living more than a few breaths. Our lives are breathed out, a gasp of exuberance drowned in dinosaur graves. Some of us leave the world without a trace. Our effects on each other, those life-changing moments of meeting all but a faint whisper in our history never to be seen. How we met and how they met, glances and gazes scattered across our threads of life to be treaded on by unknowing time. But music and words project the beauty of our times into the future, we hear what was heard centuries ago, the pair of lovers glance and grasp yet again in our present, they live and die eternally. Not just matches embed in human history but mismatches, pairs that never saw through each other’s eyes and there forever remained an opaque shield around their being, that you gaze into their eyes and don’t know you see nothing. That persistence on crafting a perfect match, swaying with the notes in the air, you reach across the room with your eyes and faintly feel your gaze bouncing back, yet you keep grasping for more light for more.
But we dance without speaking, and live without playing. So if your spark of childhood never died you keep within you this eternal treasure. But those whose spark was lost struggle to find it with someone’s help and believe they found it not knowing they have not. But going into someone else’s world, their perceptions of the world, that they perceive you, that somehow through the obscurity there is a spark that ignites where two souls collide and become something much larger than themselves. So was this the point of it all? How have we lived that at the end we can say that was a life worth living? Is this all there is? That pursuit of meaning may be so frivolous we abandon it altogether under endless work, from which we convince ourselves of our satisfaction because it must be so, else why have spent your younger life devoting to this and killing all other life? To refuse a conversation is to kill that life, the call and response and music of words. Those breaths into the past never exhaled and shaped were given a chance to exist but denied that life.
There is beauty in the world, undeniably beautiful life and sounds of the past. But today, these stories today and sounds we perform to the world are history to fondly reminisce. So we shape the past for the future, when we then gaze into each other’s eyes and silently acknowledge this undeniable beauty we live in, or loudly exclaim our love of life by our love of others and through our passions and massage the sandstones into ephemeral sculptures of your beauty. So when the west wind blows we know that our eyes have seen beauty, that we have lived beautifully, then we close our eyes and know this was a life worth living.
Like an improvisation, stunningly beautiful yet never to be heard again, this is how we live our lives. Not to record a fabrication but to experience the reality. To explore and dream wildly, knowing these soon to be unsuccessful endeavours are a meta-trip for your mind and your philosophy, that objectives are only guiding posts for how we should live. But like any development our stories take twists and turns and go into unfamiliar land. Do we linger near the beaches and look out to our known seascape and not go deep into the forest? Dabble and frivil or throw yourself into resplendent vivacity? To live but not to live is what would be regrettable. Because it’s those major chords in funeral marches that tell us what life is all about. The light of delicate bells outshines the shoes sinking into mud at the rainy graveyard.
So we ride on along these tides holding each other tightly and loosely, that at any moment one of us’ threads will untie and be loosened into the sea. But we hang on knowing that it’s worth hanging on. So we can climb the mountains of our minds hearing the beautiful waves spray mist in our past, under the foliage we see each other with clarity in their eyes for the first time. I touch your hand as we walk into the night of the forest.
Presumptuous Ponderings 