First and Final Chapter
This is the way that it started – I know I have told the story before but for the sake of thinking purity, I will repeat it in full, and for the benefit of those who follow those who were lost I will repeat it with wet-sand footprint precision.
My first memory was the smell of human fear as we huddled close, standing in a tiered ring atop cold and disinterested stones. In my mind, we were much like a tight-knit and protective clan, attending the sounds of night with glass-shard sharpness, and listening fearful to wild tales told by feckless winds. Winds that whistled and wailed their siren-call warnings, keening through the intricate lacework of spider-web tree-tops. Yet for all its visual grace, the lace held no bond and the entrancing encirclement was regardless foreboding, no matter how grand the lure of its beauty. Those tree-tops closed ever tighter in a movement threatening to permanently encircle the sanctuary of our ancient granite look-out.
Mostly though, I remember the chill cold sweat of a never-ending night that pulled and sucked my clothing too close to my frozen body, exposing my prickly skin to the worst of the icy winds. Yet for all the bluster and fury of a bull-roarer gale, I remember also the surprising warmth of a soothing calm that started seeping into my inner core. A boon of warmth bestowed or earned - I know not which - by the comradeship of human touch and the shared smells and perils of our fragile ring. A peril that was no longer faced alone.
I remember also the pitch-black darkness of that mid-winter evening, as we gazed skyward, fixated by the blazing silver starlight blackness of that graphic imagery that never seems to fade, no matter the darkness or brilliant sunlight that may have followed.
While others were attuned to the import of the moment, my thoughts wandered elsewhere, caught in an Elysian field of sunlit meadows and the musky smell of a love imbibed deliciously and thoroughly well. There is a pain in the retelling, but my footprints must be traced, and no wayward grain be granted.
While others shrivelled and shrunk with the foreboding of ill, I raised my crystal goblet into the icy emptiness of a deep-black night, splashing blood-red wine into a haphazard quilt-work across my crisp-white linen sleeve. Across the ring, Diane’s lion’s mane hair followed her startling-green eyes in a graceful arc as she turned that exquisite chin line, until the glowing deep-red halo vibrated to a shuddering stop, in a feline movement that echoed to the deepest chambers of my carefully hidden soul.
She was my life, my thought, my everything. She was the foil to all that could hurt or harm or hinder me. Yet it was not her musky warmth that filled my nostrils. That space was claimed already, and in the staking of that claim lay a lifetime of misery, and the end of much that was meant to endure.
