Chapter 8 ~ Nowhere to Run
“Nowhere leads and guides
Hearts of love
Stories to bind to tell are read”
How is it that emotion runs so high after midnight? Much like a child’s fever, somehow the body just knows that the sun has set. At times bio-rhythms run amuck. “Nowhere” over takes the heart and leads it deep into darkness. A darkness that will cause the heart to do anything to find light again!
How long had she been walking in darkness. How long had he been feeling his way through life with hands tied behind his back. Whose story was he living out? He wanted to tell it, but was bound to some rule that men are not suppose to really share how they feel. Only in moments of some poetic attempt at life would truths of their soul come out, much like thieves in the night on the height of the full-moon.
She was filled with hope. Convinced that life was going to be simpler, easier, freedom guaranteed that didn’t. She remembered all too well another full moon. One particular night it was there, even though it was over shadowed by a cool night mist, and clouded over in the July Alaska night. Walking out on a deck alone, feeling the breeze, dark, Very dark, what was lurking below in the black Pacific waters? It was eerie how she could hear, but could not see the water that splashed only feet below where she stood. Her imagination was swept away to some gothic novel of maiden faire sailing across the seas to start a new life. Is that what she was doing, starting a new life? Or was she merely painting over the old with a fresh paint and papering? Can anyone ever really start new? How can you, the residue from the past is there, always there. Only denial and diversion would help to minimize the lines and creases. Yes, that is what she had become good at denial, diversion, duality, it was the way to quickly pull it together and forge on. This time though, there was not going to be any easy diversion, no more denial, and duality was something she swore she would not do anymore. That route was way too exhausting!
“I am just so angry, you hurt me so badly. Why did you come?” His words stung and shocked her back to reality. There she was in the dank, room. What was it about that room? Peeling wallpaper was all that held the plaster in place, so it seemed. She recognized the wall paper the first time she visited the little house on the edge of town. It exact wall paper that she had seen in her mother’s bedroom as a child. The room reminded her of a reoccurring dream that she had of a small house in a little town south of where she grew up. In the dream the house was being given to her as an inheritance, all the antique furniture was to remain. She would always wake up after realizing that she did not want antique furniture, there was something maudlin in antique furniture. The old wallpaper in the room tired her out as she would have to work so hard to remove it and put fresh paper. There was a feeling of frustration as the thought of removing paper would somehow diminish her benefactor. She wanted to wake up, to be back in her little day bed in Chicago.
Tears began to flow, not only her tears, but his, the pain was real. Never in a million years did she expect to be the one to hurt so many. “I am so sorry, so Very sorry!” She reached out to touch his face, he pulled away as if she was going to hit him in place of the gentle caress that she placed upon his cheek so many times before. Her small hands, the ones he had adored, now became a threat to his space. She sensed the reality of his perceived violation.
“Please forgive me, try to understand. You left me alone, you told me you were not coming back.”
They held each other tightly, months of agony, loneliness merged together, misery loved company. What they should have found the way to do months earlier, they were able to find in that moment. Both needed just to be held, to be rocked to sleep like orphans abandoned on the doorstep. Reassurance that the sun would shine upon them again, and their friendship would bind up their tears. Tears that would only be shed in the future to make for good stories to tell grandchildren someday… of the love they almost lost.
