Eternal Eyes
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The sky was bright with Heaven-glare. The early, crushing evenings of winter were long past and the sun did not shy its face from the earth as I walked over the field towards the lone tree. Its leaves glittered with color; the field shined with gold and the sky was fairy blue.
Wind played with the long black curls of her hair as she smiled at my approach. Her dress was white but failed to cover her arms, those long smooth limbs warm to my hands in the evening sun. The white rays caught with sudden fierceness on her face as I drew near and kissed her rose-petal lips.
She buried her face into my neck. I breathed in the lavender scent of her hair. The heat of her entire being burned against me like the wax of Psyche’s lamp upon Cupid’s flesh, driving me mad with love. She gazed up at me with shadowy eyes. Oh, if only I could have drowned in them.
“When will we be married?” she asked.
“Soon,” I said, tracing her lips with my fingertips. She closed her eyes at my touch and we stood there for a long, silent moment. In the distance, a crow laughed. A cicada scolded irritably.
“You will always say that,” she said, not opening her eyes. She took my fingers and squeezed them, placing them against her cheek.
“Soon,” I promised again.
She sighed. “Alright. Soon.”
A year later, I returned to the tree under the snowy glow of a full moon. A cool breeze stirred the moss dripping from the boughs, languid ghosts in the silver light. She was waiting for me again. We were silent for a long time. Crickets sang a concerto that I would probably have found beautiful once, but now it was just dim noise to my ears. Much of the beauty in the world had vanished a long time ago; like the flame of a candle into the dark heart of the night.
“I brought you this,” I said. In my hand was a blue spiderwort flower. “You always told me how you never understood how such a pretty flower could have such an ugly name. I thought you would like it.
She did not reply. I could feel her looking at me, her eyes boring into my soul. I struggled to breathe. A year…a whole year.
“I…I should have married you right when I first saw you,” I said. “Then maybe things would have been different. Maybe then, we could have been happy. But…I was scared. I was afraid of…I don’t know what.” Tears stung my eyes like tiny grains of glass. I gritted my teeth. “I’m sorry, Elisa. I am so very sorry.”
I placed the flower next to her headstone, where I had insisted she was to be buried. Bits of leaves and twigs had fallen there which I brushed away with my hands. Before I left, I kissed two fingers, then touched them against her name on the stone.
Her eyes, I knew, watched me as I left, perhaps from those bright lights burning above me. Those same, eternal eyes I wish I could have wandered for all time.
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