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.

 

A Eulogy for Love - Chapter 6

For a woman, all resurrection, all salvation,

from whatever perdition, lies in love;

in fact, it is her only way to it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Each man kills the thing he loves, according to Oscar Wilde and I love Nikos with all my heart and I'm killing him. I'm killing his psyche one day at a time. He's in love with me I feel it, I know it, but his love for me will never be reciprocated and that he surely understands. Perhaps if he told me about it something would change… But who am I trying to fool, nothing would. It would be better for him though if he stopped keeping that secret.

Secret? Not really. Everything shouts out the truth of his feelings for me; the way he talks and smiles to me, the shine in his eyes, his tenderness towards me, the way he worries when I'm not okay. He loves me with a pure, almost innocent love, whether he talks about it or not. Women always know. They know how to read the signs, yet they act surprised when someone, better late than never, confesses their feelings to them, if they don't love them back.

If there existed somewhere an ideal world, a land of dreams and a utopia, then he would be for me the ideal lover, the perfect partner. I can't think of a single woman who wouldn't want to be loved by someone like him, someone who lives love, and who never says I, unless he's about to blame himself for something. My desperate poet, will, I wonder, ever love you as much as I want to, as much as you deserve?

He's so special, one of those unfortunate souls that no matter how much they try they never find peace of mind. He will keep looking always for something, someone, and he'll keep turning inwards trying to conquer the desolate shores of his soul. And he will always leave, seeking the new, the strange, the different, the unknown.

No woman could ever stay by his side for too long. He's a man without a country, a fallen angel who doesn't quite fit in in our earthly world. He walks in the streets and sings All You Need is Love, he waves hello and smiles to the passersby, he looks up to the sky and his eyes sparkle as if he's about to fly. No woman could put up with him, not a single one. Just a couple of hours ago I've asked him what he did today and he said that he "became by four lines of lyrics richer." My crazy boy, my wise man, women love poetry, but they love security more.

It's painful for me, it really hurts that he's alone, but however sorry I feel for him, I can do nothing to bring him out of his solitude. Besides, what could I actually do to help? He's built his wall all by himself which means that only he can bring it down.

Oh, I wish, I pray that he would simply go away once again. Not necessarily away from here, just away from me. I don't want to find myself in a position that I would have to ask him to go. I simply want him to understand that I'm not right for him. To understand… To understand… To understand what? Oh God! I don't want him to go. I want him to think that I want him to. But if he does, then what? How could I live with myself then? I love him and he loves me… How could I ever tell the only true person I've ever met Do not love me, forget me, go? How?

I love him more than myself, and yet I could never live with him, become his second wing. He's too good and that I cannot stand. He believes that with his mild manners and peaceful gaze and his love, he can conquer everything, everyone. He lives in a world of dreams, while I survive the day to day hard realities of this one. He spends almost all his time, day and night, giving to others, and he never stops to think whether his efforts go to waste or not, or even if those others deserve his offerings. And even worst he believes with all his heart that I'm worth his love. Well, I don't think I do.

I have always been a pessimist, viewing the world through dark-tinted lenses. I've always expected things to go bad. While living a happy moment, I could see things taking a turn for the worse not long after. I don't know who or what to blame for my outlook. Perhaps it had something to do with the things I've lived. Maybe with the fact that I haven't met him early enough. The moment he stepped into my life, things started changing. Everything did. My days, all of a sudden, got rid of the black and  dressed in colors, and my nights were filled with poetry and music. He and his, let me call them, idiosyncratic friends have arrived like a breeze in my life, rejuvenating my senses, waking up my hibernating fantasy.

I admire his friends, almost as much as I admire him. They live the moment, every moment, they suck, as they say, the juices of the tree of life (I'm pretty sure that some poet wrote this, but his name, right now, I don't remember.) I am so happy that they took me, with open arms and so much love, in their company, and I'm so sad that I'll never be able to be like them; someone who can turn life into a poem, a song, a sculpture, a painting. If it wasn't for people like them the earth would stop spinning, the world dream would be erased from all the dictionaries in the world. Thank God there still exist the crazy ones, I've once heard someone say, I think it was Maria. Thank God. Thanks to them love, fantasy, visions, beauty, all that is worthy and true are still alive.

Might I but moor tonight in thee! I've once heard Emily wonder aloud… Might I moor in you? I want to do that, I really do, but I won't. When I've met you it was already too late, I had given myself to somebody else, and to him I still belong. You gave me all that Marios never did and for that I thank you. I know you hate these two words but since you're not going to read them or hear me saying them I dare whisper them in these pages: thank you!

I would like to hug you, kiss you, caress your hair, express my gratitude for you being there, for you being you, but I won't. Instead I'll keep filling this journal with these thoughts, safe in the knowledge that they'll remain hidden. This is my silent way of saying the thousands of thank you's I owe you. If you have, by some miracle, become the listener of my soul, then this thing here is going to be my secret confessor, someone that will never speak aloud, unless I want them to, the things that are best left unsaid. I am a flower that slowly gets eaten away by the secret poison.

Nikos, my poet and painter of my dreams, they say that the paper has no soul, and they are wrong. These pages are more alive than anything in the world. They have my scent, they carry my thoughts, they hide your omnipresence, they see my tears and feel my pain and joy. This paper, I'm writing on, is like a beating heart, it's all the world and nothing at all. Soulless is what soulless people call it.

Isn't it funny, or rather strange, that for some time now I'm writing as if you are right here and I'm talking to you? I feel like I'm composing a letter that I'm never going to send and that's not too far from the truth. But, if this was a letter, it wouldn't be so long, it wouldn't overflow with hurt and joy. I would simply write: Keep leaving (and living,) seek your dreams, reach for your peaks, stay you!

As I am writing these words, right next to me, in bed, lies Marios, the first man that made me feel like a woman, he who made me one. He is the body, you are the soul. He fulfills my desires, you make me want to live, to hope, to fly.

If we were spirits, you and I, we would set wings in our own secret skies, we would discover our personal paradise and we would built a world so full of beauty that in front of it the colors of the rainbow would pale. But we are not, we are made of matter, we depend on it. And that's probably why we two could never be… You are more spirit than matter, I am the opposite. And opposites may attract but in the end they capsize.

The beauty that deep inside me I hide no one will never know. Not even you, even though you may suspect it. I will stay with Marios and the hurt that goes with him. Somewhere inside I feel that I need this pain. The same glass gifts me both bitterness and delight.

To be continued.

The quotes written in Italian, unless implied otherwise, are by the Greek poet Maria Polydouri.

The image was taken from here.

 

A Eulogy for Love - Chapter 4

We are each of us angels with only one wing,

and we can only fly by embracing one another.

Luciano De Crescenzo

Evenings have now become synonymous with solitude in my lexicon. The silence slices through me like a double-edged knife. I want to talk, to scream, to wail but there's no one around to hear me. No, no one will hear my howls, no one will wipe away my tears. There'll be no silent comfort. The longing is, oh, so big and so small are we, the people that make up its parts.

How silly is our life and how fools are we to put up with it as it is! Silly and tragic. How does it change courses from one moment to the next, just like that? How does it break our dreams into pieces all at once? In a moment, in a single fateful moment I've lost everything, I've lost everyone. I've lost you and all our crazy friends; the poets of life, the prophets of doom. Almost everyone I ever loved have become pieces in the labyrinth of my memories: you, Maria, Kostas, William, Emily… You've all turned into ghosts and the sun no longer caresses my soul. We are but shadows of shadows, Kostas used to say, and he was absolutely right.

The weird thing is though that an untimely feeling of sanguineness seems to be currently running through my whole being. I feel that from now on everything will go well for me, but how? How? How can that happen since I've lost you, the most precious stone of my existence, the flame that burned my body and my heart? Am I finally going mad? I sit here, I look at the earth that cages your human body and somehow I feel optimist! How can it be?

This night is, like the ones that preceded it, deadly quiet. The heaven above is dressed in cloudy black and the stars, just like yesterday, are furnishing their light on some other skies. It's as if the elements can feel my pain and trying to silently stand by my side.

Water has started falling from above. A light drizzle. The tears of the clouds come cold and wash over me, and bring joy the grass, the handkerchief of the lord, according to Whitman.

Everything reminds me of you, all of you. And every single thing cries out to me: you are alone. The mask of sorrows has become one with my face but I know that one day I will expel it, I will get used to the new order of things and get on with my life, but, of course, I will never forget.

Eleni! Your name keeps running in circles in my mind, I can hear it whispered by the wind, sang by the birds, and I can see it written on this land by the raindrops.

I wonder if you've finally found salvation, my love. My love! How ironic, I've never called you that when you were still alive and yet here I am doing it now. The distances that tear us apart and bind us together. Everything can be said when no longer anyone has anything to lose.

I'm going to tell you something, something of old that was left unspoken, thus it's still new: I've always made dreams for Us. I would sit in a train, watching the scenery hurriedly passing by before my misty eyes, and think about you. I would fly towards distant lands, looking at the clouds beside me, the sea and the earth below, and think about you. I would walk in green fields and deserted beaches, I would climb up mountains and go down ravines, and think about you. I wanted us to share the same images, to live the same sunsets, to experience the same things, to rise together to the heights of our collective imagination. I've dreamed all that with my eyes open, but the moment I closed them, I could no longer see us together. Why? The answer to that arrived to me in the most cruel of ways, as you well know.

As I look back I now realize that our differences were big, but somehow we've learned to live with them. If we ever became a couple, probably they would be a problem, an obstacle that would pull as apart. Not becoming one is the thing that saved our friendship. As for our common interests they were few, but enough to keep us close: the poetry and the music, our readings and sporadic excursions to the islands or the countryside, the most simple yet beautiful things.

I close my eyes and I bring back to life in my head all that we and our friends have lived together. Our discussions without end, the fugs, the nonstop drinking and the singing in the hidden beaches of Paros, Emily's stories, Kosta's and Maria's silent eye to eye conversations, William's accompanying of our every word and thought with his guitar. I remember you shedding silent tears as Emily sang Imagine with her blues voice, Maria smiling almost inwardly with a knowledgeable look on her face, and the rest of us staying still, lost in the magic of the moment. I remember the sun rising like a red crocus through the sea, the birds waking and starting their morning chorus, the fire, the ecstasy in our gaze…

And the river of sweet memories continues to flow without a break, before it unavoidably spills into the stormy seas of my being.

To be continued.

The image was taken from here.

 

The Walk of Life - Chapter 3

What surprised her the most was his calm manner that seemed to border to insensibility. But no, he wasn't insensible, and he's already proven that, he was just peaceful. And the peacefulness that ran through his whole being was so obvious that it could turn someone else mad. How could that be? How could he be like that? It was almost out-worldly the way he talked and acted. To her eyes he was wrapped in mystery, a mystery that she was eager to investigate.

They were walking in quiet for a long time that night. He asked her naught and he didn't even try to find an answer to the many questions that have started piling in his head since the moment he met her. Could it be that he wasn't that interested to know how she found herself on a Saturday night-Sunday morning, sitting at a park, alone and in tears? She asked him, without words, and so he didn't answer. At the moment she thought he didn't care, but as he would explain later he was simply letting her to decide whether she wanted to talk to him or not. He didn't want to blackmail her answers. Besides, he had already guessed the reason why, so all that remained were the details. The truth is that she wasn't willing to share those details with him at the moment because of her lack of faith in people. And if she couldn't talk to the people who knew her about it, how could she ever tell everything to a complete stranger?

So they kept silently walking their path towards nowhere in particular. They'd listen to each other's fade breaths once in a while and steal glimpses of each other's figures, but no more than that. It was as if they were walking in the forest and not the city streets. They hardly noticed the vehicles passing by, nor the voices of the other night walkers.

She doesn't know, she can't tell with a certainty since time stood still that night, how long that walk lasted, and she could never guess how much it would mean to her one day in the not so distant future. That simple walk would open for her the gates to a new life, a life full of tenderness and hard truths, clashes and reconciliations, love and repugnance.

Now she shuts her eyes forcefully and paints in a masterful way on the canvas of their inevitable past. She paints them as they walk, like friends and strangers at once, in the old city streets, listening to the sounds of the waking day and the dying night, and her inner sight is flooded with the colors of a rosy dawn and his warm unexpected presence.

No, that was not the happiest night-day of her life, but perhaps it was the most important of all. It was the beginning. The beginning that would be followed by many endings. The beginning of everything and nothing. Of the nothingness that now fills her life.

When I'm away I feel closer to you than ever, he once said, trying to find an excuse about his proclivity to leave every so often, for his need to visit new places, meet new people. If I don't miss you then I won't be able to love you the way I should, like my ideal you, he added, making her smile, in melancholy. Now she feels exactly like he describes, closer to him than ever, as he accompanies her from sleep to awakening, as he emerges so serene, and angry, and stubborn and tender out of her memories.

She regrets it. That she drove him away. That he left her. But she believes that things happened the way they were supposed to. Did they though? No, she's not sure about that, she could never be. He keeps insisting in his letters that everything happens for a reason, and that the pain of parting is far better than the daily death of life, and things like that, but she can't really follow his logic, agree with it.

Often enough she loses her head and then finds herself feeling like she hates him, she despises him, but not long after the mist clears from her delusional sky, and calmness, though unwelcome most of the time, returns and then she loves him again. She loves him with a lazy passion, almost drugged, because he have helped her find her own way in life, and then vanished like a passing shadow on an unending universe.

She's not kind to herself. She keeps asking him tough questions. She thinks that the answers can offer her an illusion of salvation. What would she do if she hadn't met him? Who would she be? Where would she go? These questions weigh in her thoughts and though she secretly knows the answers, they are softly killing her. She was saved by his love. He saved her from her own self and her false passions. He saved her from a self that wasn't hers to begin with. And she thanks the unknown gods of fortune for that, and she blames them, for the gift they give her, for the one they have taken away.

She feels strange. It is quite weird how someone like her, that makes her living through the art of word, cannot truly and clearly write on the blank page all that she wants, to put all the words in line and try to express how she feels. Perhaps, in the end, all her words were meant for him. But, maybe, she really doesn't know how she exactly feels at the moment, and thus she can't describe it.

Nevertheless, she is certain about one thing: that she is now poor; poor and rich at the same time. Poor in her day to day life. Rich in memories of the past one.

She's now wholly wrapped in a veil of sadness and she has no clue as to whether this self-imposed solitude could be the medicine that she needs. But, even if it isn't, that doesn't change anything. She wants to be all by herself. She's sick of people. People who have eyes that do not see, ears that do not listen. She's sick of them and they are sick of her, since none of them can any longer stand to be close to this great melancholic. No one can feel her, or even get her. And the truth is that she feels sorry. She's deeply sorry not for herself but for them. She no longer wishes to sacrifice her soul for their sake. She will not wear her fake happy face for them. But she's also sorry that she can find joy no more in the small and the unimportant, the ephemeral things in life. She's sorry that she can no longer give kisses in the air surrounding the ears, and exchange small compliments, extracts of lies, with the others, as the rules of social contact dictate.

And she's full of rage. A rage so fierce that seems to rule her every moment, destroy it, and which keeps her soul enslaved. It may one day calm down, weaken, and turn itself into something else, something completely different, but probably that's not going to happen any time soon. Unless, of course, he comes back to her. Or unless she meets someone like him, an exact replica, someone who will get to know her without asking her anything. The letter…

The image was taken from here.