A Eulogy for Love - Chapter 7

When age chills the blood, when our pleasures are past
For years fleet away with the wings of the dove
The dearest remembrance will still be the last,
Our sweetest memorial, the first kiss of love.

Lord Byron

Yet another day is about to kiss us goodbye. And yet once again I'm here with you to share in the loneliness of the coming night. An eerie silence seems to have taken over the cemetery grounds though the sounds of the city can still reach my ears from afar. The smooth air of August is a bit warm but its breath is getting cooler by the minute. The sun is sharing its last red smile with us. The pale city lights one by one come to life… Banish the light! It tortures me, it denies my soul to me.

Eleni, I sit here, over your grave, and think that the whole world begins and ends at this sacred spot. If my mission was to travel the world all I had to do would be to walk around this patch of land that blankets your body and return to the place that I'm sitting right now. A trip around the world, a trip around a lonesome soul.

I close my eyes. The real world turns black, but through this darkness emerges like a shining light you. Your essence. You are smiling and the air all around me changes scent, it now carries yours. The, oh so few, birds I can now hear sing with your voice. I feel a hot breathe on my neck and as I open my eyes it all dissolves. For how long will you, my beloved, haunt my life, my every waking moment and my dreams?

I knew you so well and yet so little. I could read your every glance, listen to your silences, guess your thoughts, and often enough I spelled the words that you wanted to say. I knew you more than my own self. I could understand you. I could see why you insisted staying with Marios but kept it a secret, I never let slip a hint that I could understand. It would be impossible for us to one day live together. I knew you so well and yet so little, since I could never have imagined that one day you'd decide to put an end to your life. Suicide is only a solution for the cowards, you used to say, and stupid as I was I believed you.

The world, or rather life, is a great mystery and I doubt that there's anyone out there who can fully comprehend it. Is there anyone that can truly understand how life changes from one moment to the next, how nothing is granted, how the wheels of fortune can sometimes bring about some unexpected and terrifying events in our lives, how tomorrow for a lot of us may never come?

Now, like a deserted island I wander into your lands of solitude, with the dolor of the west as my constant comrade.

I could never have imagined (I know I repeat myself, but I have no choice, my words are too poor to express my deep grief) that when I came back from my last journey you'll no longer be here, and along with you all my friends would be lost. Now I am but a refugee of love, someone who has no country. Because my homeland, my religion and my family were you. To you it was that I've always wanted to return, and not to a city, to a land.

I am to blame for what happened. It was me that got you carried away and thrown into the vortex of my madness. It was me that turned his hand into a deadly weapon powered by jealousy. It was me that made you drink that poison that ended up sending you into a bleak never-never land. It was all my fault!

I don't think that it's easy for someone to understand what it feels like to live day after day with a knife nailed in your heart that doesn't kill you. The pain of twisting it around with all you've got, of pushing deeper inside, and not dying. It's unbearable being alive in the graveyard of life.

I have never before felt in so much pain. And never before had I felt so strong the need to rise up again from the abyss I found myself in and stand firm on my feet, and follow my lonely path that more likely than not will lead me to nothingness or simply nowhere.

I look at the stars as one after the other almost shyly show their faces in the city sky. If what they say is true, if every time a child is born on this earth a new star appears in the heaven above, then I wonder which star lost its glow and faded away when you died. I'm so sad that I have chosen in the skies above the brightest of stars to shed for you their sorrowful light.

This morning, when I've finally managed to abandon myself to sleep, you visited my dreams once more. I saw you smile, as usual, but behind you there was nothing, a spotless white canvass, the infinite. But, all of a sudden I saw another face breaking away from yours and coming into the light. It was the face of a girl of roughly your age which I have never seen in my life ever before. Then you smiled at me, smiled at her and vanished. I took her by the hand and together we strolled into the unknown. I wonder what that meant.

To be continued.

The image was taken from here.