Motto: Every single day you teach me something new.
Every single moment I wander awaiting for the knowledge you spread.
When they first met, Jane never thought they’d be more than acquaintances. Never had she dreamed for their relationship to be more than professional. They had met by chance, as she was in search of salvation. She had traveled millions of years and taken numerous wrong turns before she finally arrived to encountering him. She had previously analysed all other offers available and his was the only one that stuck out in a sea of false and commercial. She thought it had been meant to be, come to think of it, as she only received cold, standardized, impersonal responses from all the other firms.
From the very first response she understood that the phrase “I personally reply to all e-mails” was not just a line meant for publicity, but the pure truth. As their conversation unfolded in various e-mails, she decided he could be trusted, that he had passed all the tests of her insecurity and was a worthy representative of his team. In a couple of days she took the decision to participate in the activities they were proposing and hope for the best.
She was not set for disappointment. Immersed in familiarity and professionalism, in the middle of his group, she was able to cry, to let go. She gave herself the opportunity to feel again, she enjoyed everything they worked on and, for the first time in her life, she felt she belonged. About two or three weeks after that first e-mail, they actually met. He was introduced as “our dear leader”, and she felt everyone looked up to him as an older, wiser friend rather than a fierce boss. At the end of three days of learning, he mentioned to one of his advanced students that she was smart and that he could tell based on the velocity of her eye-movement. She happened to overhear it and thought he was just saying it to make her feel better or simply to be polite. At the same time though, it made her feel like a freak. The one that she deeply knew she was. Only that she was now having the actual confirmation of it being so. She felt attacked, disclosed, undressed. Seen. And burst in tears. As he was majestically keeping his feet on the table, she was crying her eyes out.
That first encounter would always be with her. She would forever treasure it as the moment of a clash between fear, control, steadiness and pure good, love and peace. It was bound to end in turmoil. And it was only years after that she came to understand it.
A few months later she decided it would be better for her to leave town. At the time, it seemed a necessary move. And, as she had already done six months prior, that time, once again, she deliberately cut off all branches that sustained her, all new links to reality, to people, to souls. She didn’t even say “Goodbye!”. There was no opportunity. Nor did she think of apologising in an e-mail at least.
For months to come, she had been undead, like a zombie, in a carousel of routine and basic needs that kept the body going as mind and soul were numb. They were ‘friends’, but she was rarely following his posts. she could not care less about a dream she had decided to bury deep into her subconscious and try to forget.
Then, all of a sudden, one September day, news came that he was to come to town for business purposes. She was longing to see one of her old colleagues, as one of the most beautiful reminders of the only lighted part of a dark period in her life. Once again, she did not actually see him. As the activity unfolded, she watched him speak, she listened and applied. Yet, her numb soul could not see. Feel.
A month later they started intensive classes. This time, the group was not what she had hoped for. Rich people that afforded jewels and cars, working for big firms all around the city attended. She could connect to none, hard as she had tried. Shallow, empty, two-faced people. In fact, two months into the program, her colleagues decided to abandon the group and go their separate ways. Only a few remained. She had no choice. She could not afford throwing a dream away once again.
As time passed, there was a shift in her mind, in her way of thinking, then implicitly in her overall behavior. She wrote down what she felt, all the euphoria, and published it. Critics were moved and surprised to the point of being speechless. He found her writing to be moving. And she began to question all the walls she had built around herself, all the judgements people made regarding her being and her writing, all the opposition, frustration and diminishing words she had felt and listened to over the years.
Poetry happened. and poetry surprised her as a handsome demon from her subconscious. She liked her writing, never praised it, but accepted it to the extent of interesting prose. Poetry nevertheless, as written theater for that matter, she could never grasp, let alone enjoy reading. She discovered poetry could not be written in blank verse in order to feel as such, thus she needed to work twice as hard to find the appropriate rhyme and rhythm. Granted, it might not have been Shakespeare, but it was hers and she treasured it as such not because she was the creator, but mostly because he was the inspirer. “In all the languages of the earth”, she described all the beauty he emanated. All the good, all the wise, all the sexy and all the painful. All the kind. This lead her to finding him deep within the blood cells, into her skin and on her mind, walsing from organ to organ, from pain to brain.
Nowadays, it’s been years since they are friends. An eternity really. And still, she fears that the link that unites them is so frail that it could break at any moment, pulled by the weight of nothing other than the infinity of both their souls.
We are so close to one another that the hug would become suffocating.
You are air in Space, I - the infinite void that engulfs you.
We are two parallel lines, two trees with entangled roots, that choose not to touch their branches not to shift the direction of the wind that caresses their leaves.
We are Yin and Yang, Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve, Father and Son.
Sun and Moon.
We are.
And this is good.
For whom?
