One Last Sunday
I lay there with my head resting on the grubby pillow of some cheap Nepali digs I’d found after being spat out of that opium-filled Hindustani universe.
After a lifetime between the Kalic legs of those spellbindingly beautifully brown women, those defiant, magnetic eyes challenging you through hijabs and saris.
An inextinguishable feminine flame dimmed over the centuries but never eradicated.
I lay there, enthralled by the sound of your voice. Tasting each word like it was carved in Delphic stone.
And your memory drifted back to one of the last poignant moments you shared with Claudio.
A Sunday in the hills together.
The first time he looked at you, a soon-to-be-widow, and conceded among the sounds of the crickets and the eucalyptus melting on the bitumen, that the beautiful moments would be numbered, Patti.
That first day you actually grasped a future without your husband. That life would be forever altered.
That this charming Italian you’d fallen for at that bus stop would be atoms once more in a matter of months.
Whatever that meant.
Despite his furious devouring of the Christian Science magazines strewn desperately around your bedroom floor, not far from the bloody tissues stuffed in hidden places that you’d silently collect.
A secret transaction that neither of you would ever verbalise.
Because nothing could prepare you for that moment, could it?
And all the religions on this conflicted planet, all the well-intended advice about just-getting-on-with-it from those stoic, war-hardened family elders, all the optimistic, boyish certainty of youth, the artistic movements, the heavy, candid philosophical talks of life and death as you sat there drenched in the smoke surrounded by the fondue gently hardening in the morning light, the card games and the chess pieces as one decade merged into another, girlfriend became a wife, wife became a mother, revolutions were won and lost by oil-hungry guerrillas in foreign lands, women traded miniskirts for burqas, Nixon declared war on drugs, and artistic genius’s overdosed in Greenwich Village studios, all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn’t prepare you for the coldness of his skin and the stiffness of his delicate hands as, true to his word, he became a memory.
A lingering, ghostly signature on the mortgage.
Eyes glaring back at you as you watched your daughter anxiously drift through those first teenage nights without a father.
And your mind started to cling to words and phrases he’d once said, filtering the reality from the dreams. The person he was from the person he was becoming as his omega watch ticked away on your son's wrist, who’d apparently become a man in the years since you’d first heard the diagnosis.
An awful, agonising reminder that this world stops for no one.
And I asked if the years had changed your perspective of the man you once knew. The man whose eyes you’d once seen the world through.
If all this time had coloured the stills of your youth with a different hue.
"It's clearer," you replied.
Clearer!
As you were now twice the age you were on that beautiful Sunday.
As you’d seen grandchildren and marriages dissolve. Conmen and drug addicts rise and fall. Found love again and built a sunny northern oasis. Become a widow for the second time.
As you’d seen the world swivel anxiously on the fingertips of a button in a Soviet bunker, the rise of the Islamic State, and the year 2000 roll around as unceremoniously as any other year, as all those certain doomsday fanatics uncomfortably stuffed their Mayan calendars behind the cupboard and returned resentfully to their desk jobs in the new millennium with a little more work and a little less life.
"It's clearer."
Those words were the only tangible evidence I’ll ever need to discard with the linearity of time. To digest the true sanctity of life.
The mystic moment at the edges of sense and intuition endlessly en route to becoming another memory. Another universe rustled and awoken in some unknown future when, as we wander through that vaporous maze of experience, we gaze back on the majesty of our lives and realise that against the heaving throng of trivialities, all we ever had was time.
