The First Night of Winter

He entered the one-room garret to find Marla in front of the floor-to-ceiling arched window with her right side to the doorway. Neither spoke as he walked across the garret's cold wooden floor. He stopped about ten feet away from her. The time was 5:20 PM. Without turning to face him, she softly said, "sundown is 5:22 PM." The last rays of sunlight of this, the first night of winter, struggled to glimmer through the window. Marla stood in shadow; her ribbed woolen sweater clung tightly to her body, accentuating her figure. Her full-length pleated skirt fit snug on her hips and then draped loosely down to her muscularly toned calves. Her hair, now cut to shoulder length, appeared colorless in shadow. She stood there motionless as the last arrows of sunlight shot across Paris at a sharp low angle, barely reflecting off the city's zinc roofs below.

As the last rays of sunlight fell below the horizon, Marla stood in the shadow at winter's fall. She had never looked so beautiful to him. This time, he saw Marla not as the young lady he met forty-two years earlier but as the adult woman she had long ago become.

Both stood there in silence. Marla never turned her head; she continued staring out of the window. He stood in the silence of the moment, not wanting to be the first to speak.

"Don't turn on a lamp," she said without turning to make eye contact. Marla stood in the darkness of her silence. It was classic Marla. To get to her light, one had to pass through her darkness.

For minutes they stood in silence. The darkness in the garret eased as lights across the city began to turn on. Marla slowly turned to face him. He stood looking at Marla as the skyline of Paris lit up behind her, keeping her face in shadow.

After a lifetime of repressing his feelings for her, his emotions for her started to explode. As magma that bubbles up from the depths of a volcano destroys the rock in its path on its way to becoming spewing lava, he could feel the surge within him rise, and he knew he could not stop the force which came from his emotional core.

" Marla, you have never been more beautiful."

"I think I was prettier when I was twenty years old," she quipped.

"You may have been prettier when you were twenty, but in all, you have never been more beautiful than you are at this moment. I have always said, if angels are real, they must look like you, Marla. To me, you have always been hotter than the inside hinges on the gates of hell."

Marla glanced softly at him. She hadn't any intention of interrupting compliments. However, she was not expecting what came next.

"Marla, I love you. I have loved you from the first day I met you. I have never stopped loving you. You have been in my heart and soul every moment since I met you that spring night in 1975".

Marla's eyes opened a bit, and her lips parted as she drew in deeper breaths.

"The reason I asked you to come here..."

"Marla, through all the would-be girlfriends, short-term flings, one-time encounters, there has always been you in my heart. With every woman I have been with, I imagined they were you. I always did."

His words tore at her heart. She asked herself, "How could he have been in love with me so intensely for so many years and never tell me?" She asked herself a question to which she did not want to acknowledge the answer, "How could I have never realized he was in love with me?"

Then he said the words that she would never forget.

"The one thing they all had in common was they were not you."