Love #19: In Your Memory, I Still Live

 

Once upon a time, far far away, there was an old house that lived so close to the sea she could hear the waves at night and smell the salt in the air. And as the house breathed in, her curtains blew gently across the bedroom floor, and she smiled.

She smiled because of the certainty of her existence. The house was neither shallow nor pretentious. When she asked questions; they were meaningful questions, to which she knew the answers. She lived in the Order she had created at the edge of the chaos swirling around her. She saw the confusion and plunged her hand into it to take the things she needed. And as she pursued her life goals, she smiled, a little more complete with every breath.

But within her bedroom, all was not as it should be. He stood in a state of uncertainty at the window looking out. Certainty and Uncertainty are living with each other.

He said to her, “My uncertainty results from the order you impose.”

She said, “It would not be the start of a week without you telling me that you must go.”

He said, “I have no intention of ‘leaving’ you. You breathe for us both.”

She said, “Order is about uncertainty. All around us is uncertainty. Order is something that comes to each person individually. You make sense of part of the world, understand it, appreciate vulnerabilities and risk. Just because I have established Order in my realm does not mean that you or others suddenly ‘get it’ as well.”

Then she took a deep breath, and the curtains blew around him, encasing him in a gentle prison. She continued, “But I hope that the Order I establish is infectious, can be transmitted and can remove some of the vulnerabilities and risks that others might need to face. I fear your disorder; it may be destructive. It may serve only to advance your desires for a world free from the need for self-doubt. This ‘negative’ Order becomes a prison for yourself and a burden for those around, where everything you do is fixed in purpose and does not vary according to the way the uncertainty impacting on others changes the way you should act.”

He struggles to unwrap himself from the curtains and said, “That is not true. I thrive on change. In uncertainty, I can test ideas and emotions. Someone once told me that it is the right-hand side (the emotional) side of the brain at work while the left-hand side controls things out there in the world. But, I have told you all that before. I do not believe the right/left brain theory, but there seems to be some mechanism that allows the brain to explore and test that is quite natural and powerful.”

She said, “Let us not argue. Let us imagine us sitting together looking at the ocean, and hearing you tell me your life story from the start. That is something I hunger for.”

Lindsay says, “When I read your letters to me, I still hear your voice. It is pure and crystal clear. It is hard to be content from a distance, but the tension of losing you rips at my heart. It causes me to howl at the deceit of the world.”

She sighs, “Let us focus on innocence, rather than deceit. Deceit is a word of power, one of many that held countless many in misery. Innocence is a word of gentleness and freedom. The love you have for the world can never just be taken for granted; it always must be innocent. When you look upon the world in rapture, it must be the world you see in the moment, not your reflected self. In the same way, when our fingers once touched, the spark was twixt us.”

He said, “Today, I tried to paint the beauty of a field daisy. A friend mentioned that its original name meant innocence. Again, I can think of Nothing more innocent than sitting on a beach, and watching the day pass, listening to talk about life and dreams.”

He stamps, tears in his eye. He shouts, “That is something I can understand! It is something I can preserve.”

The house took a deep breath, “Then, come sit on the shore of your uncertainty. Let us trade stories of our youth. I may be long gone from the world. But in your memory, I still live.”

Copyright Dark Aelf, 2021 

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[Continuing on with a second exploration of ruins, we have come to the country estate of the Australian painter Lindsay and the inferential relationship he had and wrote about early in his career. ]