Undying Love

Undying Love

Cachunk, grind, swish.

Frost's bitter talons tear at windowpanes seeking an ingress while spreading its smothering kiss over fragile glass.

Veils of voices whisper my name on the mid-January Alberta numbing prairie winds as I zip my heavy coat again and go back out to finish what we began.

My love is drawing close.

Hands warmed fold under thick gloves and grasp the shovel once again.

Cachunk, grind, swish.

The familiar, repeating, pattern of my life.

My love? Lost in the breath of galaxies being born and the thunder of wild horses galloping past black moons of desire in an all-consuming, encompassing and unending love.

Some only wish.

I wipe at tears freezing on my cheeks.

I was looking for a mother's day gift when I met Orianna at our town's garage sale. Our town’s annual July garage sale where neighbors visit, kids play, and strangers from the big city arrive to purchase our winter’s accumulated hubris. Only, I’m sure, to hold their own garage sales, adding their own junk and ours to someone else’s - you guessed it - junk. At some point there’s got to be a world record pottery dish that’s been in three thousand and forty-five garage sales. Well, isn’t the old saying ‘one man’s moccasins are another man’s Tony Lamas?’

On a table before me a collection of crystals sparkled. One crystal heart of swirling gray smoke whispered to me. As if under a spell everything around me stood still as I held it up to the sunlight; mesmerized. At its center royal purple smoldered dancing like the heart of a dying star. Mother would love. “I’ll take it.”

“No. You can’t have it. It belongs to me.”

I turn, a sultry voice buries itself into my soul. She touches my arm.

Shocked, I pulled away. Our first touch, her second enchantment. Remembrances of past lifetimes, or ones to come erupted? So profoundly intimate as if I'd known it and her before.

“Excuse me?”

“That heart. It was taken from me. It’s mine.” She held out her hand, her determination grating on the air between us.

“Miss I-didn't-quite-catch-your-name, I don’t think you understand. This heart was for sale by this fine gentleman, as he'll explain.” I looked around but he had disappeared. Obviously not so fine after all, nor a gentleman. Just a coward.

“Orianna. That heart was stolen from me last week, as were the rest of these. But that one is the only one that matters. I want it back.” Her lip quivered and those eyes of moonlit passions smoldered.

“Whoa. Now that’s a lovely story sweetheart, and we can both see that this crystal is rather unique, but there’s a problem here. I’ve already purchased the heart. Good day.” I slammed the fifty bucks on top of the hand-scrawled price tag and moved past Orianna without giving her a second glance.

Seductive scents of gardenia and lavender wafted from her as I walked by. Calling me to fields of summer flowers and us naked, frolicking. She was stunning, I’d give her that, and stirred my blood like no woman I'd ever met.

Full red lips trembled whispering spelling words. Her eyes cast of gray witch-fire stared through flowing ebony tresses. They say it takes a fifth of a second to fall in love. Right then and there I knew.

My fifth was up.

“You don’t understand. I must have it.”

Like I must have you, my lips wanted to blurt.

“That heart is sacred to me and was stolen from me last week. I want it back.” I should have let her go, give her the heart and my life would have remained mine, normal and sane.

Instead words erupted from beyond my control. "I saw it first, I'm buying it. If you want it back come out with me for dinner." Why'd I say that? It is said one sentence can change the entire course of your lifetime.

I hate New-Age know-it-alls.

Seething, she agreed. We talked over food and wine at Hood 29 that night.

“It’s the simple unexpected moments,” she told me, “that shift whole lifetimes from one path into another.”

“Like what if the Titanic’s captain decided he wanted to finish his spot of tea first and left port ten minutes later, only to miss that iceberg?” She hated my sarcasm.

She told me she was a Wiccan witch of gypsy bloodlines and her family’s traditions run deep in mysticism and earth magic and spoke of someone stealing your heart. Neither of us thought that tradition was literal.

She believes we are only energy fields trapped in physical bodies and we never truly die. We just simply transfer realms as our journey continues. I laughed at the time.

My father once said ‘Beauty is only skin deep, while craziness dwells in the bone marrow’.

I fell headlong into crazy.

We married within the year. So, if you were guessing, dinner went really well. It was like being under a spell, only I didn't care.

I should have listened to her warnings before we got married and made commitments that couldn’t be broken. Ah yes, married forever, till death do you part. Only what if your partner believes you never truly die?

Two years after we were married Orianna began to cough up blood. My perfect world crashed as the doctor told us she had stage four incurable cancer.

She once said everything in our lifetime is a learning experience.

Lessons? Learnings. What a load of crap. Lies to satisfy the egos of enlightened idiots who don’t have the guts to call it what it really is. Bullshit; cheap, you-unlucky-bastard, bullshit.

She gave up talking to me about matters of enlightenment after I said it was meant for dudes named Mahatma and his side kick Buddha while I’d be happy with knowing the forecast of tomorrow’s hockey game. That's enlightenment.

Consenting oneself to hell, and actually living through it, are two different stories. She refused chemotherapy, couldn't stand having her hair fall out and her chakras upset. I could never have imagined the torment and agony Orianna and I would go through. Two years of bliss and two of hell. The law of balance she called it. I told her where Madame Justice could shove her scales.

Balances and checks, God’s will, nature’s course, the yin and yang of meta-physical blah, blah, blah. We were soul-mates, twin flames, forever linked, she said, preordained by invisible threads of fate. All a load of crap. All psychobabble of spirit matters that I had a hard time believing even after she contracted the cancer. Then it really didn’t matter what I believed in. Nothing mattered after that.

She wanted the crystal heart buried with her. "It will keep us connected forever."

Little did I know?

I cried on many nights after we buried her in our farms backyard.

Until one night when a hauntingly familiar voice cracked the still of the night.

“Happy Valentine’s, my love.”

The bed shifted as a weight settled next to me. Cold hands touched my face and lips of honey frost burned against mine. Was I dreaming?

I moaned, sighs echoed back. A chilled tongue licked my ear, cool fingers slide down my belly and began stroking me.

This was no dream.

Drained and ragged, the morning came far too slowly, and many more after that, According to the horoscopic seers I saw, trying to find answers, it depended when certain full moon, celestial stars and equinoxes all aligned. Yada, yada, yada.

If I’d known at that first meeting, I’d have kept walking, clutching Orianna’s fifty bucks in my pocket and Mom would have got her usual card and bouquet of flowers. Perhaps I'd have lived the rest of my life occasionally fantasizing about ‘what if’ and the one that might have gotten away as I enjoyed a life of suburbia and two point five kids.

My shovel thumps hard against frozen ground. The temp outside is well below zero.

I pitch the shovel aside and brush the remaining cold dirt from the lid. My hammer tears at the nails I’d driven in the last time.

Stupid man.

It’s here. How, I don’t know.

How do you describe a love that takes you closer to yourself and further away from anything you've ever known? To the edge of unbidden love we all ask for, but fear to tread.

I reef the lid upward and gag on the aroma of a thousand jugs of milk gone worse than sour. Decomposing flesh, a stench I can never get used to. Tissue to nose, I stare at lips I once kissed, dark hair braided and shrunken skin over bone. Her? A mere shell, she told me. A shell that took both our souls.

Eerie hues of smoke and magenta flood the pit as I shine the floodlights down into the coffin.

I’m not surprised to see the heart glowing in her hand, again, this was the third time I'd done this and I expect I'll be doing it several more.

Certain unearthly matters I don’t laugh at anymore. In hell, I learned, the devil never gives you a straight effing answer.

I pry back the stiff fingers, pull the crystal heart free and slam the coffin lid shut.

The simple solution?

Destroy the crystal?

Only I couldn’t do that to my love.

Someday I would die and join her on our journey.

Overhead the wind sighs in a lilting voice as I pitch dirt back onto the coffin. Knowing I'll sleep soundly tonight.

Most people pray for a love this intense, the type that transcends all boundaries, breaks the rules, tears sanity from the prescribed textbooks of scientific knowledge and throws it into maelstrom’s swirling cauldron of chaos.

If only they knew.

Don't get me wrong. I tried to move on, date other women. Rosie swore she'd been pushed down a flight of stairs, and Jacqueline packed her bags, promising a restraining order if I ever approached her, refusing to tell me what happened that night when I wasn’t in the house.

I gave up with relationships after that. Never betray a phantom’s heart nor tempt a spirit’s jealousy. I’d learned that much.

I pitch dirt back onto the coffin. Mist rises all around me, my fingers ache from the cold air, but at least I'll sleep soundly for the next few months. Overhead the wind sighs in a lilting voice of days gone by. I clutch the heart tight to my chest. Memories of us smile through. Dreaming of those nights when we rode horses with manes of mercuric silver glittering under azure skies through fields of smoking crystals.

Evenings spent discovering obsidian moons strewn with hillsides of geodes trampled by the wild horses of desire, while their heartbeats pulsed in rhythm to the wide-eyed stare of mares glistening with mercurial manes. If only they knew.

I throw dirt back on the coffin remembering when those long-dead fingers used to send shivers down my body.

I laugh.

I guess they still do that.

Cachunk, grind, swish.