How does one describe love? What words are large enough? Where does it begin, does it ever end? How can we hope to capture that which only the divine can own? I don't know.... but I've attempted it here.
It seems as if she'd always known him... that they went back to a time before time began. They'd been there together in creation's womb, wandering that sacred garden naked on bareback horses. They'd played drums with painted faces around a tribal bonfire, carved bricks in Tutankhamun's tomb and followed Bethlehem's star. They'd borne a thousand sons and daughters and scrubbed cathedral floors. They'd run hand in hand through fields of wild violets and made love in a stone castle upon a veiled bed twelve feet high. They’d crossed oceans in pirate ships, tuned the strings of an olivewood lute and locked eyes during a Chopin polonaise. They’d peered into a glass jar filled with fireflies and watched them flicker as they set them free. They'd sipped from the same canteen and shared a prison cell. They’d chased each other around Saturn’s ring and traversed a dozen galaxies.... and all in a single instant, when they first met.
There was a spontaneous spark of recognition and connection between them. His voice was the sound of velvet on leather, and butter on bread. Each word he spoke seemed to hang in the sky, outlined in golden light, forming a protective canopy above her. From her spirit rose a flutter of musical notes that nestled among his words. She settled back with him into the cradle of that moment to gaze up in wonder at how perfectly they blended.
Until she met him she had framed her life with four glass walls. From within her fortress she could see for miles, but it was an untouchable world surrounding her. She felt certain he was her other self, and he seemed to read her spirit. Of course he did, for his very own rib crossed her heart.
They embarked upon an excursion of words. A great dam had burst, gushing forth the ideas, memories, tragedies, triumphs, dreams lived and dreams lost in their two lifetimes. Her head began a debate with her spirit... reason argued with intuition. But mighty wings were growing from the dormant buds that were rooted in her soul, and they lifted her in strong strokes over the glass wall, never to return.
Thus began their love story... and as time passed, it only reinforced everything she'd felt in that first rush to know him. He grew more beautiful to her as weeks turned to months, and months to years. He was her perfect counterpoint... the right balance of silly and serious, passionate and practical, restraint and surrender. She rode this teeter totter with abandon and joy. She felt fully woman and fully real with him. There was nothing she couldn't confide to him, no part of herself she couldn't show.
They merged into one body... slowly, tenderly, as a bud unfurls its petals in the sun. She memorized every pore and bathed in his scent. And they blended... in a rush of wonting, as a tide rushes to swallow the shoreline. They pressed coal to diamonds, they thawed glaciers, they thundered like a choir of Aprils, they branded their mark upon the sky. Yet, there were times, skin to skin, it was the spaces between their words that consumed them... and that was a joining every bit as powerful.
They were tested... some of life's most heart-wrenching circumstances fell upon them... matters of life and death, of hardship and uncertainty. And these circumstances twisted and tore at them until a great canyon finally divided them. With sad acceptance, they parted as lovers... but never as mated souls.
They always seemed to transcend time, didn't they. The spark that would not fade had become an immortal ember, full of life and fire and expectancy.
They forever belong to the universe, and they will go on... if not in life, then in the afterlife. Their old souls are creased with deep grooves carved along this journey of countless light years. They look like twin maps, sharing the same peaks and valleys. They mirror each other, his face is hers, his heart is her own.
Sometimes stellar companions are not fated to remain together in this world. Other duties may call. But there was no sadness for this pair. They had something many may never know.
Every night she still says a prayer for him... there are nights he enters her dreams even now. There are times she still pictures his dear head on the pillow next to hers. But mostly she looks forward to the day she'll rejoin him in that garden, naked on horseback except for the wild violets she'll wear in her hair. Her horse is speckled white, his is black with a star between its eyes, and they'll greet each other with a knowing smile and silently ride side by side into the light.... from whence they came.
