Eternal Love

And down they fell, swirling and swooping. They descended as used up fireworks cutting across a grayish violet sky; tacitly shivering melancholy blobs of salt water, tears. Splattering violently on a barren ground, they dug miniscule dints of insignificant craters into the soil, and even smaller puddles of crystalline liquid evolved.

Clasping his dilapidating hands together, pressing them to his wrinkly bowed forehead, and kneeling in a reverent posture, he prayed to God, “Give me the zeal to live on, tilting upwards to gaze at the quiet sky.” The night suddenly went quiet. Hurt, he thought, begets pain which in turn begets agony and which in turn begets anguish. What begot anguish, he wondered. He subliminally and willfully diverted his being’s dispersed energy to its center.

Inletting an icy breath, he let one last opaque bubble fulfill its destiny before he scrubbed his warm thumb across and beneath his moist eyebrows. He knew that he must live. He knew that he must go on. He felt empty, existentially vacuous. He knew that he must rise tomorrow to become one with the eclectic universal energy that is existence. But he could not face the night, tonight. He did not want to.

Only if time could stand still, he pondered, if only. And he clenched tight his fists, stopped his shaky breath, shut tight his shrinking eyes, and lay freezing still as an oak after a dead storm. Letting go of his captivated breath as a sigh, and gently loosening his tense posture, he calmly whispered, “If I embraced this night, I might elude myself; I might dim her memory in me; I might begin to forget that which was her.”

He felt simultaneously innumerable sharp stabs by recalling ecstatically wonderful moments he had spent with her, as lucid tactile idiosyncrasies. The pale pink and moist, soft petals of a ripe rose, as semblance to her once living presence, in his garden of joy had turned fungi green, mossy. And his face resembled an ancient stone statue that as once animated mortal was frozen in time by God, as when that once alive man wept, now lifeless.

Life now as mesmerizing Black Death plagued every healthy corner of his consciousness. He heard her echoing laughter. He almost instinctively jerked his head after the voice only to find her portrait gazing at him from within a simple frame hung on their home’s entrance annex wall - her eyes so full of dreams and hopes, of aspirations, and filled with glistening true promises of better tomorrows. Against a still backdrop, he felt empty resonating beats within himself.

She was no more. “God is unfair,” he barked, “You took her away from me.” Tears flowed from his eyes like warm wax, and he murmured painfully, “You are unfair. Incinerate me now with a bolt of lightning or resuscitate her.” Saliva dripped from his lips like diluted molasses. His torment as millions of scattered pixels of an obscure image seemed to become complete and whole; he could visualize his maturing grief.

They had been married fifty years. They relentlessly as poetic soldiers endured and scoffed at and fought her sickness for three years. And now she left him with a momentous grace of a salute. Vestiges of her candid laughter, he imagined. He recalled the first time as a confused young man he had read her love poem and fell in love with her. He remembered her making silly faces to tease him.

Her once vibrant uplifted life had now shrunk to an epitaph, a gravestone, and six feet of lonely earth. Apparitions of a bygone youth, she now remained alive in him as memories. And he heard her fading gasps whispering, "If anything happened to me, you will live. Promise me." Once again he wiped his sleeve against his eyes.

Putting the pistol down, he gathered himself as a singular cohesive mechanism and standing up from the once blooming terrace lawn walked over to their bedroom. Her aura was intact and fresh, still, after two years. He lay on her side of the bed, pressing his emaciating face to her pillow, his body feeling numb. "You will keep me alive in your memory. Promise me," she said. She had comforted him in a semi-hollow shriek, entangled in wires and chained to a heart monitor.

He had always felt her presence. She was there with him, in him, by him. He was, he thought, an epitome of them, their lives. He was them. She was inside of him. She was him. And he was her. Collectively, they were a living yellow that which becomes, or is, with a natural unavoidable union of blue and green. It was written; it was meant to be.

She died, but never was she gone, he thought. If she was him, he must live, fight, rebel, and charge dauntingly into the murky river of a restless life; treading as hours crawled a day; slowly; very slowly. That he was to her and to her not nothingness; he was not entirely convinced that she had completely gone; that a part of her was still around, watching over him.

Together, they were two smoky cubes of resting ice frozen in eternity; him as waiting for the door to her abode to open and she awaiting his arrival - in some far away dimension, at an infinite distance. Both of them waiting for Him, God, as season to grant them warmth for then they shall flow as two streams to become one, forever.