There are evenings when memory seems like scripture, and I kneel before it like this was my altar. Each image of you came like a relic, shining and invisible, and I bowed before it in big eyed wonder and respect. In that calm silence, I thought of his truth, \"Love is the only flower that grows and blooms without the aid of the seasons.\" But inside me exist winter and spring; your absence is a frost that makes me cold, yet your memory remains a bloom that will not die.
I wade from the altar of memory into the water, for \"Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another, but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.\" How true that seems, at this moment. My soul is an ocean, restless with your numerous tides, but your shore lies way beyond my horizon. Each wave rises like a psalm, breaks like a prayer, and crashes back unanswered, and still I send them, for I know no other motion than to you.
I get to ruins at sea, each rock speaking of my care, now a remnant of warmth. I can hear the philosopher I was again, “For the most part, Love always has a habit of not knowing its depth until, eventually, he/she has to depart.” Ruins may not inspire endings, but certainly remind us of the abyss clothed in every beginning, the abyss I once got to know of in myself, only after you departed me. And, in that abyss, even silence is never silent but thunder; even the absence has your perfume.
From ruins, I have silence itself as companionship. Not void silence but fullness silence; a full glass overflowing with invisible wine. We drank that silence together so many times; we let it fuse us in ways words never wanted. Although I must drink alone now, the glass never empties. It fills with the echoes of your closeness, and every drink deepens the ache but deepens the reverence, too. Something that felt rather easy is now an unfinished hymn.
From silence, I walk again into light; how resting under it was at once ordinary and divine. Then I nominally apprehended those words, \"Love is the only freedom in the world because it so elevates the spirit that the laws of humanity and the phenomena of nature cannot take them an inch.\" And now? Within this exile of longing, I see more clearly. That the truest freedom is not about holding on, but adorning, loving like one loves the sky; not to touch it, of course, for touching it would alter it, but to breathe it and to be made by it.
The light leads me to recall the dawns of dim reflection, when the world in relation seemed stopped in time, waiting for the music we once wove between us to listen to the silence. How holy those hours once were—now that they no longer are. It is only across our ocean of distance that I am remembering how full my vessel was, and how the tide within me remains immeasurable. Separation has not emptied me, but shown me that my soul was never a gurgling stream; infinitely a sea without end.
And past dawn arises the mountain. \"When you part from a friend, you do not grieve; for that which you loved most in him may be more clearly seen in his absence.\" And from the valley of memory, I see you as you are—lofty, steadfast, eternal. I could never tell your full height standing alongside you; now, from afar, your immensity is apparent, and I know you are not a passing companion, but rather one of those eternities carved into the summit.
At last, the mountain gives way to flame, not a mere flame, but the flame for which my soul is born. As he reminds us, \"Do not think you can steer the course of love; for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course\". It is this flame that brought me to you, as certainly as a river does the sea, and it is this flame that continues to support me. Though it is burning in solitude, it is not lessened. For what is burning in me is not a memory, but evidence, evidence that love cannot be extinguished by absence once it has been ignited.
So let this be my closure; not a goodbye, but a surrender. I will not defy the altar, the sea, the ruins, the silence, the light, the dawn, the mountain or the fire. I will embrace them all, because they are all shrines to the same truth—you. Yesterday is memory, tomorrow is dream, but today, though empty, its presence is sacred with your absence.
And if in eternity there is no reunion, still I will be rich. For I have tasted that which few will ever taste, I have touched eternity through the brevity of you. That is enough to sanctify a lifetime.
Ever yours,
In silence and in song
Though never near