Love is anterior to life,
posterior to death,
initial of creation,
and the exponent of breath.
Emily Dickinson
I think that during
this day that's about to end, a lot of people came to visit you. Less will come
tomorrow and even less the day after. Perhaps they'll bring you some more
flowers, probably they'll offer a few more tears. In pain. Little by little
this scent of spring and greenhouse will abandon once and for all your two
meters of land, and you'll remain by your lonesome, a soul among a score of
souls that were blessed with plentiful of love in life. I'd like to find for you flowers in dew, blessed with the sweet color
of the sad twilight.
You know, some people
say that love is paradise. It's obvious to me that the people who claim that
have never loved much. Love is hell. A hell, in whose fire you constantly burn.
It's also pain and a lot of tears. There are more people that have loved and
were never loved in return than those who gave love and were repaid in kind.
Love is hell, because it gives you wings and lights them on fire all at once.
It makes you weak. It gives you hope but steals your dreams. Has there ever
been someone that loved somebody wholly, truly, with blazing passion and never
hurt? Anyone that touched the flame of love and hasn't been burned? If love was
paradise I would have lived there, since I loved you passionately, blindly. But
my love was pain. Not much different from now. The pain of your absence. The
pain of your broken gaze. The pain of your whispering. The pain of you being
there, but not for me. When you love and are being loved, when you weep and
your partner wipes with kisses the tears from your cheeks, when you are in pain
and a beloved being is there to comfort you, when life brings you down and a
second pair of wings springs up at your sides and help you fly again, when you
feel the world blowing up to pieces and hear a sweet voice whisper into your
ear "Life is beautiful. I love you," then hell transforms itself into
paradise, and paradise becomes the essence of love.
I would like to have
even a little bit of talent, to be a humble painter, so that I could pick up
brushes and colors and recreate your image as it is engraved in my well of
memories: a smooth white face, sad eyes with a spark hidden in their depths,
loose curly long hair, not exactly blond nor fair, taking shape by the wind's
whims, an angelic body and in the chest a heart with two white feathers holding
it up, illuminated by a pink glow, and on the lips you'll have a wide smile, as
wide and as narrow as my world. There, I've turned you into an icon inside my
head, but a saint you never were.
Smiling! That is how I
want to remember you. I want your smiles to be my fortune, and the many tears
you've shed I'll only think as a cacophony in a perfect picture. I want to
forget the dark circles around your eyes. I want to forget the way you always
seemed to bend, about to break. I want to forget all the things I've guessed
through your silence. And yet I know that I will forget nothing, because of who
you were, because of who I am. I couldn't since I long for all that has been lost. I will be always be the dream's ridiculous
victim.
I've devoted all of
today to you, looking at your photos, reading the very few letters you've sent or
gave me, listening to songs and instrumental music that I've first shared with
you. I miss you so much, more than you could ever imagine, more than I can
possibly say. With a restless mania I
want the thing I miss, I want you.
Your presence and your
absence felt so intense in my room, small and claustrophobic, that I wanted to
start yelling, to cry out in despair, to turn my tears and the many memories
into a boat, with which I could cross the Acherusia lake to come and find you.
But, despite what I wanted to do, I already felt that you were nearby, no more
than a breath away from me. While reliving in my head all that we have lived
together or apart, I've managed to reanimate you as a creation of my fantasy, a
person that was there and yet was not. You came back to life as a single
teardrop that didn't run dry on my cheek but kept on going, crisscrossing my
whole body and spilling into the land, and thus passing into eternity.
The songs we've heard
together, the lyrics we've read, our times of madness, the secrets we've
shared, the smiles we've exchanged, all our confessions, the great moments that
many people have dreamed but only a very few lived, these are the things that
will always haunt me and make me feel a little bit proud about the riches of my
yester years. And as long as there's a heart beating in my chest, your heart
will also go on beating. My soul will always be the faithful comrade of your
soul.
They say that death is
the ultimate limit. Well, I refuse to acknowledge it. Limits were invented to
keep us enslaved in cages not of our own making. Beyond all, above all is love,
and it knows no limits. It pays no heed to the no's and the don'ts, it
doesn't know what must means. We put
labels on love, the fools. As if we don't know that love is the thing that
cannot be told. Beyond place, beyond time!
Now, I want nothing more than to reach you, to
stand close enough to you to be able to see… to see once more that very first
look you gave me as I came along… all those tiny wrinkles on your face… to see
your smile… to see your arms spreading forward to embrace me…
The lines written in Italian are taken from Maria Polydouri, a Greek poet.
The image was taken from here.
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