Three chairs made of stone, facing the ocean. Sitting on two of them, a woman and a man. They face the ocean, too. While they talk, they barely look at each other. The ocean listens everything they have to say to each other.
From the outside, they would appear as complete strangers, both surrounded by their own personal bubble of time and space.
Yet, their coincidence is not... well... coincidental, so to speak. It is the result of a carefully planned rendez-vous. The bubble, just one, envelops both of them in a communion of sortilèges... Like the sounds coming from a seashore battered by unfatigable waves.
Today, she is wearing a glowing-white dress, that sits magically well on her body. "She looks as if she had come out from a dream", he thinks, wondering about her. Is she really real? Human beings never impressed him the way this woman does.
The man had arrived earlier. He did not know what to do with his time prior to the meeting. These hours were not really his: they already belonged to her. He is nervous. She noticed that as soon as he saw him on the bench, and smiled to herself. For him, the thrill of having her around is always a radical experience, even after all these months.
But the man arrived earlier, too, because he would not miss the moment of her arrival for anything in the world. It is been too long a strecht of time since the last time they met. Stupidly long.
He watches her coming from afar, a distant pier. She walks at a cruise speed, always constant, unhurried, very characteristic. The man can perceive the air around her being displaced with her elegant, regular cadence. The way she moves is the single most wondrous thing he will enjoy in his life, no matter how long and rich it may be.
There is something in her walk as if she were not going anywhere in special. She smiles nonchalantly. While watching her approach, his time stops as usual. Whatever he may have been thinking one minute before, it is gone, forever. He is still, deeply focused in the glowing-white of her figure, "a true angel", barely smiling at her. His whole being completely taken hostage by a beauty he has learnt to expect and delight on, but he will never apprehend or understand fully.
As she gets near, he can distinguish the contour of the glorious smile in her face. Radiant like a sunday, yet serene. She seems genuinely happy to see him. Lovely and fresh as a sunshine, awe-inspiring as a sunset. He fell on her orbit a long time ago, and has no plans to get out of it. He is delighted, confused. He is used to it. Fighting that would be as pointless as revolting against an angry ocean.
The man stands, walks towards her, exchange cheek kisses and helloes, just as friends would. They are in a public place. She sits down, crossing her alarmingly beautiful legs with natural, adorable, subdued modesty. Meanwhile, he, standing still, watches her figure unashamedly. He tries to take in all her beauties in small sips, without hurrying, also without pausing.
Little by little, the paralizying effect gives way to a steady current of affection that warms his heart. Maybe hers, too. He cannot know for sure.
She knows he is drinking her blue, taking the daily dose that he has missed for too many weeks. "Let the guy replenish his levels", she seems to be thinking, amused and a bit touched, while smiling lovely to him.
"It's strange, you see? Yesterday I though I could not remember your voice anymore... It's been too long... yet, your eyes I could picture them easily, even with my own eyes closed". She laughs almost silently, opening her lips as if she were to talk, and closing her eyes.
She is flattered, she blushes. Not by his words only: she feels deeply in her spine his attitude of adoration towards her. Watching again her, blushing like this, takes the man to a moment and place where he felt a boundless happiness.
"How have you been?", she asks, looking again to him.
"Oh well, the unanswerable question again", he thinks, laughing, but only half-amused. "I keep going, thanks, you know...", he says finally.
So they are, side to side, both looking at the waves. It feels to him like a rendez-vous à trois. The ocean is the only other lover he will ever have. "...You know well how happy you make me, just by coming here. Thank you".
She does not even answer to that. She hates intros. "...it feels wonderful and weird at the same time...", he continues. And he is saying the truth, nothing but the truth. In his long, solitary walks, he has searched for her impossible company, he has weaved a thousand monologues to her, in his mind. If written, they would make several books she could read for months.
"What I mean is, hum, all this time, I have not stopped for a second thinking in you, talking to you in my mind... I know it sounds crazy, but to me, it seems impossible that all of this may have been lost...without record".
She nods, as if facing a challenge, and protests: "Hey, but it was not lost... I was listening, somehow... and I read the messages you sent to me...". She looks a triffle uneasy, all traces of her former smile are gone from her beautiful face (but, justice be made, she is beautiful when she is serious, too).
"I did not mean it as a complaint, dear... I have past the complaining phase, and I am willing to move on. I just have'nt figured out where and how".
He says this looking briefly to her right profile. He is astonished at what he sees. The blue of her eyes blends so perfectly with the ocean, all-in-one, and he thinks how unlikely will be to watch something so wonderful again, if she is ever gone. She has everything to make him whole until the end of times. Awed by the sheer beauty, he thinks "Why talking about anything at all, really?".
"I really read all your messages you sent to me this summer... You made me laugh sometimes, and I needed that. And you kept me company... Thanks", she says, although she hates everytime she feels forced to say something.
"You are welcome... Believe me, writing helped me, too, to forget the distance and the silence...You know what is the weirdest to me? It does not make sense I love you so much, I have so much good to give you, and I have so little time to do it... live... It does not make sense... And then, I waste a good part of that little time we have together talking about this relationship, instead of developing it... It is absurd, don't you think?... You know I love writing to you, but I should tell you how being with you is becoming essential to me. Even without talking, just being, you understand?".
Now she looks at him, sideways while he stares at the blue eye of the ocean. "I don't know... Absurd or not, it is what it is... We have our own duties, and you know well how hard it is some days to find time for ourselves, not to mention time to be together...".
"Yes, you are so right... I am just stating what I would love, so you know it. Reality tends to be boring, unless we spice it up with some wish...".
She looks intently at him. "I thought you prefered light and easy... I thought we had agreed on that...". She says that with a humorous undertone, knowing that things in reality are never so black and white.
"Yes, exactly! Light & Easy, the old classic, of course! You are so right!". They laugh together, whole-heartedly. They are in a place beyond words, now.
"...But you know, while we are laughing, I should tell you that I would be the Lightest and Easiest guy in the world if you just happened to love me a little". She listens to his words, digesting them. "Have'nt you noticed that? Whenever you have shown love to me, I glow... my words caress you...". He stops. She is still looking affectionately to him. "Hey, I don't imply you should love me. I just point to the fact that any lover becomes more generous and less needy (less focused in himself, hence lighter and easy), when the other lover feeds him with her own love. It is just natural..."
Again, the old talk. The feedback thing. This guy is as relentless as the ocean waves. Nevertheless, she seems very amused. "Wow! That was a long phrase! Relax, take a breath, man, watch your heart!". Then, serious again, she says: "I cannot say if I love you now, or if I will... I just don't know, and I cannot lie".
"I know, I know... And yes, I don't want you to lie to me, no matter how much I would rejoyce while listening certain words from this sexy-pretty lips of yours".
Laughs, complicity. Sometimes, the smoking-hot prelude to something they could have called "intimacy", or so he thinks at least. But how to know for sure?
Sometimes, her spelling of words that have the power to change the world, and then again, "I must go, it is getting late", and tomorrow the same words will not be repeated, so they quite never get to build a nest for that stranded love to grow.
The man and the woman stay there for some more time. She knows too well what is going on in the man's heart. He does not have a clue, really, about what goes on in hers. Some days, total darkness. Some other days, a handful of hopeful rays of blue light. And so he goes on.
We will stop here our indiscreet dialogue transcript. Enough to say that they keep talking, and the time spent together is for the man so much more than a rendez-vous...! A tilt, an eternal song singing within his soul, anchoring him forever-and-ever to the radiant woman on his side.
Hours before, at home, while listening to a song, one among many hundreds that has been indelibly stamped on his soul by her sheer existence, he realized: "There is no end for us, really".
And now, with her so near, and so distant, the thought has something of a perverse, funeral flavour inside.
Later, when he goes to bed at night, this relationship will seem fictional to him, almost a script he played in his mind and his heart, with a sparse, possibly irreal counterpoint beautifully sang by an angel dressed in glowing white.
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