A Fable

A Fable

Don't cry

The best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other

e.e. cummings

There was a very old man who fell in love with a very young woman. And, as often happens in love, there was no rhyme or reason to it and it didn’t matter if no one understood it or criticized it. How could they? He never told anyone about it – not even her. It’s not that he didn’t want to tell her, on the contrary, he thought about doing so many times. But ultimately, he decided he didn’t want to burden her by making her the subject of unrequited love.

           And yet, sometimes, when she would look at him in a particular way, with sad eyes that nearly closed as she smiled (indeed, they were sad eyes but also kind and forgiving eyes) he would wonder if maybe – just maybe – she also loved him?

           A friend of his from a long time ago used to say, “There is no fool like an old fool.” But he was not a fool, as far as he could tell, because he was fully aware that the obstacles facing such a disparate love – one where their ages were separated by several decades – would be an insurmountable task. Still, the attraction was undeniable and from the moment he first saw her, there was a pang bringing a mixture of forbidden desire and perennial longing. But it wasn’t just love at first sight – as many would contend truly happens – it was also a love at first sound and of interaction of minds, for when they met, she spoke to him, and her words were beautiful-sounding and intelligent and denoted honesty and a wisdom far beyond her years and he felt, right then and there, true love smashing him squarely in the face, driving itself deeply into the sinews of his heart, leading him down a vortex of angst and yearning from which, he knew, he would not be able to free himself. So, there was much suffering in knowing that a love so profound and so reminiscent of youthful love, despite his years, would never come to its fruition on this Earth and gone were the chances of ever solving the mystery she personified. So, he fell into a comfortable yet painful state of existence in which he allowed her to always occupy those spaces in his mind that he reserved for thinking about the things of beauty and in so doing he felt her presence in his life would, in his mind, whitewash the world of its corrupt grayness into that of brilliant colors and peace…and poetry.

           There are also those who would say, his old friend included, that, in life, there is one particular moment for everything and the really meaningful things in a person’s life, true love included, can only happen once – “once in a lifetime”, they say. But he felt this was not a widely held assumption and based on his own experiences knew that opportunities can be lost and, yes, you may even have regrets, but life finds a way of bringing back more opportunities, perhaps even better ones. He truly believed this because during his long life he had had fluctuations of happy moments and sad moments, lived through times of momentous change, had found himself in situations where he felt trapped by dire circumstances in which feelings of hopelessness had prevailed, had hit rock bottom, so to speak, in a sea of uncertainty. And he had always found a way back to the surface to take another deep, desperate breath that would fill his lungs with hope once again. After all, are not birth and death the things that really can happen only once in a lifetime? And he had been in love before, not just once but several times, and thought he knew what to expect every time and after he had lost his wife, many years before, he thought love would never happen in his life again. But now it did. Only this time it was very different because of the intensity of the passion that loving her evoked; it stirred like a perfect storm within his being leaving him breathless.

                These were the thoughts that ebbed in his mind as he fell asleep one night feeling perplexed. He suddenly felt he was floating in a dark void, spinning slowly. Billions of points of light began to appear becoming brighter and brighter and began to undulate in an enormous wave. There was a strong force bringing him closer and closer to an immense circle of darkness as if riding a mysterious ocean of cosmic dust. He felt he no longer had the strength to avoid falling into the void. Then, suddenly, as if summoned by a magical force that he could not understand, she appeared in front of him and she was smiling…oh, that lovely smile – it was moving stars around a black hole! And the world (he was back on Earth now) began to spin in an anomalous fashion, creating obtuse angles where empty space now became visible and there was a folding in the fabric of space-time, motivated by some incomprehensible mathematical catastrophe, that had brought her to him to meet at a precise moment where now, with everything measured not in Earth time but in Cosmic time, their ages were just fractions of a second apart and a new reality appeared, one in which they loved each other, lived together, and embraced, for what seemed an eternity, while sharing their admiration for all the beautiful things in the natural world, the Cosmos, and all of the other complexities that, in his mind, no longer needed definition. Why? There had been in the universe, as far as he could tell, a second burst of creation. And these deep, deep feelings were a far better fate than wisdom.

           When he woke, he was weeping. But they were tears of joy: he had suddenly, for the first time, and for the briefest time, experienced the breadth and width of everything life has to offer, as if it had really happened (maybe – just maybe – it had) and he knew he was okay if death wanted to take him because he would use the remaining light within his soul to think of her until the very end of his existence.

Moral: In every second of every day, there can be a glimpse of eternity.