Sophia

[Facade19]

“Won’t you stay?”

And so I thought, I strung around her neck a noose that she seemingly, yet unwillingly accepted.

“What for?”

“To rekindle the fire?”

“That one has burned a long time ago.”

He arose from his asleep, shivering from the cold that his night time sweats gave him.

“But, maybe, maybe there is still some time left for us to make a new…”

I could not let go of this dream, of her. The dream that enchanted me each and every night, the one I tried to desperately to escape from. That dream was a pastiche from all those lovely horror tales I read in the thinkers I admired. Old useless romantics.

“No, not a chance. Once the fire burns, nothing is left.”

Glares from the moon reflected the stark emotions that stirred from his soul onto the canvas of the night. Stares cold as could be suddenly flared up in glazes of wet poignant fantasies.

I tried to forget and not to get distraught, to overcome these shadows that on being locked up in my closet for all those years, and to chase those phantoms that dared to contest my serenity and mildness of wind. The tranquility I sought and felt never could be captured, and so surprised and baffled I became once I endured the worst of it all, only to find that maybe the peace I longed for was in forgetfulness. And so I dared to chase away those feelings that kept me innocent and human and in return I received a darling of an ever giving prize, a price I thought was well worth spent. No, I knew that I had to overcome the last bastion of creativity to fortress the keep and to sail away from the shores of safety to discover new lands full of wisdom and ambiguity.

He slowly removed the blanket that covered his wet body, a sheet reminding him of what he could have had had he only not been cowardly so he thought. Picking up the glass half empty next to his bed on the nightstand, he took a slow zip, letting the distaste of vodka pour away his guilt, purge his soil. Even in his drinking he was calculating and deliberate, not letting fate have an opening to manipulate his lonely misery.

She was what I call an elusive dream. An entity untouchable. A cloud in the sky, moving along with the tune of the wind. And I tried, really attempted to keep up with her and grow wings myself to see myself fly along with her, to whatever salty destiny her path would draw up next. And so, I tried to convince a mole that he could see, that a turtle could outrun a rabbit and that a sheep could become a lion. None of it. All of it gone.

Sitting on his foam mattress, in a moonlit room that still informed him that the twilight was far away, that the dawn was not yet to come, he looked emptily into the rich imagery that the moon painted for him outside his room. And while the darkness of the night was trying to chastise the moons smile, it did not dare to cross its path with the weary wanderer resting his wonder there in that cold, lonely room.

“You do not love me.”

I kept on hearing these words over and over.

“You do not love me.”

The crucifix on the wall, the Torah scroll he just purchased lividly placed on his bookshelf, while a Quran was opened on his desk, still at the same page he left the previous night unresolved. A statute of the Buddha adjacent to Darwin’s works and a library full of dead men and lost loves.

“Sophia, don’t you realize? That you are it, that you are the one I love the most?”

I remembered the first time I came across her, full of wonder and yearning, and I was seduced. She was a charm, a darling, a blazing fire that burned deeply in my conscience, in my soul. Sitting in that old class, learning of Aristophanes and Plato, I suddenly noticed her charming eyes and bright smile, and how I was reduced into nothing. Right in front of me, a beauty like none other, a heart-beat that shook the whole world. I was there and she too, and so I dared to approach her and ask her for a moment of time and I lifted myself up and took a chance to take the ride of my life and for a moment, just a moment it seemed, she responded and welcomed my attempts to love her.

“Love me, and you shall fall.”

“But you are it! None are like you. Your taste is sweeter than the sweetest of all. None compare to you, not even the one. You are the precious love my heart beat for and I long to taste you once more.”

“Love me and you shall fall.”

He could not avoid weeping. He felt his throat soaring and tried to restrain the intense pain his heart was exuding.

“You do not love me.”

She still has not responded. And I was still daring to believe in her.

“Love is in faith?”

And she still has not responded to what I had told her. What I asked of her.

As he wiped away his tears, realizing the loneliness he now had to endure was the price that his love for her required, he mustered what remaining courage and picked himself up. As he returned from the bathroom, having washed his face and dried it with a blue towel, he regained his strength to endure.

Loneliness, that is what I have felt all along and from the moment I dared to look at you, I knew I was heads over tails in love with you. And you, you seducing mistress, you charlatan of a ghost, you knew it too. And you knew from the very beginning that this would not last and that your bodacious smiles were meant to lure me in and reduce me to nothing. You trickster, you whore, you sold me out.

Sophia, you liar, you cheat, you betrayer. I loved you and bore my naked chest to you and you only sharpened the poisonous dagger and brought me closer, and all this time, I believed in you and your love, and yet you devoured my soul.

“Love me and you shall”

Looking at the mirror, upon which he saw the bookshelf behind him with living minds, he repeated the same words over and over.