And I'm still trying to
understand how can
a woman who's loved die
Kostas Karyotakis
You are dead
now, my beloved, dead. Like my soul. Now life has lost its meaning
for me. It's no life. There's no life. Why live a life that's not
whole? The truth is that I was never afraid of death, though I got
the chills at the idea that one day I would be gone forever leaving
you behind. Forever,
there's such finality in this word. But I stayed. You went instead
and left me sitting all alone at the edges of a deathly fresh grave,
whispering my I love
you's to the dirt
that covers you, and delivering oaths of undying love to the wind
that blows away dreams and phantoms in its passing, and to whom you
may lent your thoughts to shuttle to the moon; unless of course those
thoughts were just moments ago splashed with pain, like mine, this
cruelest of nights, are.
The cemetery is
abandoned in the deep darkness of Hades, but the souls that have once
loved shine like eternal lighthouses of deliverance, even when
everything looks as black as tar. They remember, they forget, they
laugh and they cry. Oh, the
sad joy of loving you.
My life was
always half-empty, full of non material shortages, and that's why I
kept leaving; I was going away in search of you, Eleni, to the
furthest corners of the earth, to the lands of dreams and long lost
sunsets. I was looking for you at the places where I'd like you to
be, where I'd like you to be with me. But, you were someplace else,
and the wonderful sunsets looked weak and pale in my eyes, tired from
the voracious glances of all the people, sad for those who loved but
have never been loved in return.
Perfect is what
you love with all your heart and is not yours. And you were never
mine, except in some of my most crazy of dreams; dreams that make you
wake up in the morning with an enormous smile painted on your lips
and reflected on your soul, as you feel the happiness of existing in
all your being.
You know,
Eleni, you've always belonged to someone else and that gave me pain.
But you were alive and that blessed me with joy. However, death, some
people claim, tends to bind people together, and right now your
presence in my soul has become a heartbreaking howl that makes me
bleed. I am but a shadow that crawls in the dirt, a leaf that's lost
its root and is carried away by the
wind.
The silence
that permeates this place is reassuring in a way. Here lie the
living, in the outside world wander unsatisfied the dead. For those
who are here have managed more or less to live somewhat, to perhaps
walk the paths of wonder, while the others are more
dead than the dead as they go on living,
as a friend says.
I could never
have imagined that a pile of fresh earth would be enough to sent my
dreams packing to the other world, if such a world exists that is.
But now as I see it I weep, I regret… I regret for all the tears I
have not shed for you during the endless bleak nights of my solitude.
Tears never came easy to me. Not then. The tears, I feared, would
take away the sorrow and the pain I felt that we were not together,
and truth be told, my sad, desperate self wanted to suffer. It needed
it like a poison that doesn't kill you but only makes you stronger.
Suffering for you meant loving you. But, how do you know, now all
those tears that for such a long time I've kept caged deep within, in
the destitute harbors of my soul, have rushed out and became a
waterfall that drops violently in the abyss of the sea of pain.
I turn my look
towards the neighboring graves. Some other people that have loved,
hurt and wept, are sharing this big piece of earth with you.
Why do they
bury the body, as if they don't know that the soul that lies within
is a bird that longs to fly? The soul is a sister of the wind, a drop
of rain, a grain of sand, a sparrow that lusts for travel. It doesn't
want to rest. It wants to spread its wings and become the most
beautiful runner in the skies of freedom and fantasy.
They've buried
your body, Eleni, in order to rid the world of your memory, to erase
their guilt. As if your grave is their deliverance, a signal of their
secure lives, the mark of an end whose beginning they want to push at
the back of their minds.
They must
really hate us, the ones we left behind,
I can hear the souls all around me whisper in my inner ear, and they
seem to prepare their revenge. When the bodies of the living are
asleep, the spirits of the dead are wide awake, and some nights,
under a full moon, they visit the former in their dreams and remind
them of all those things that they long to forget.
But, what are
these thoughts that time and again keep creeping into my mind as I
sit here? They never passed through my mind before this very night.
Perhaps… Yes, that's it; my soul is now dressed in death and thus
can only look at the macabre.
Excerpt from the first novella I've published in Greek in 2000.All the sentences written in Italian are taken from Maria Polydouri, a Greek poet.
The image is taken from here
