LIVING PROOF
The sun was setting when he first met her.
Not one of those Amazon sunsets where the sky is all fire and lava. Not one of those Vietnamese subsets where blazing sun is replaced by utter darkness in the blink of an eye. Nor was it one of those sunsets in the far north where a rainbow of colours slowly float through an icy twilight.
Just a standard, subtle English sunset, with that harmony of light and colour which is common in the British countryside.. and he hardly noticed it at all because she was there.
“Are you alright? You look like you’ve been through hell and back,” she greeted him.
He tried to reply with something clever about hell being one of the few places he hadn’t been to.
She must have liked that, because she sat down for a drink with him. Then met him again. Then again, for a month.
She was a lady of vast intellect. Immensely learned and also immensely practical. Never did her utter a statement which could be doubted, or which she was not utterly sure of. This gave her an unquestionable conviction in all she said.
There was no branch of philosophy, or psychology, or history, or the occult, or any subject of interest to her, on which she was not an expert. Rather than leading to arrogance, this increased her humility.
Her hair was a golden brown. In a certain light it was close to the colour of honey, in another light far darker. He had known girls with hair like feathers, but this lady’s hair was not like that, it was soft but with the vitality of a wild animal’s fur.
Her eyes, which were the blue of an arctic sea at dawn, spoke of great dignity and calm. And she was always dignified.
The fine set of her jaw and cheekbones were paradoxical; because they expressed both extreme strength and gentleness. Her nose was perfectly and finely proportioned to the elegance of her visage.
Her mouth was like the very first opening of a rosebud and bore the same dignity as her eyes.
Her neck was fine and slender, but not to the extent of weakness. As was all of her petite body.
When she spoke it was with the same peerless dignity as her features suggested. Her voice was like song- quiet, graceful and expressive of her vast wisdom.
They spoke often, on almost every imaginable subject, but never at great length. There was a harmony to their conversation, like between the sea and the sky.
“You have suffered quite a lot,” she once observed.
It was late in the evening. They sat close together on the roots of a vast oak. There were bats flying overhead, which they both enjoyed.
“I have seen a lot,” he replied. “Some beautiful things to remember, others to forget, some things to endure.”
“It is the nature of all things to endure, or to change. Those options, and only those,” she said softly.
They held each other a little closer.
One day she went away. He thought that she may have hinted or warned of it beforehand, but he was not sure. It was very vague, she was going somewhere to the south, somewhere in the mountains. Very vague, or maybe he just didn’t remember.
“Now it might be the whiskey in my veins talking, or the days alone straining my mind, or the shadow of death upon me, but I could swear down that she was the living proof of the god’s mercy,” he thought to himself, sat in a dusty armchair.
He remembered the way she walked, hand in hand with him. Her feet didn’t seem to touch the ground. She was not on the Earth, but in harmony with it
“The embodiment of the grace and mercy of the god’s…”