Life and Fantasy

In the wind I imagined the faint and distant sounds of the past; among those it would seem to me I heard my beloved of yesteryear calling. I’d listen and wait, searching for her voice. Had she died and was that her soul seeking me out in the emptiness of death?

Or else, I thought, it was as if there among the living, far away, she was thinking of me and of what was, trying to remember my voice and my face. I’d say into the wind. "I am here; you found me, I found you, I love you still, I have always known that you have not forgotten. Please stay a while and commune with me"-- And we did and I seemed to drink once more of her endearing tenderness. I poured my longing into the emptiness of the eve and I felt that it reached her, and she reciprocated.

Slowly I would walk back and rejoin my reality and my destiny, my aging and my inadequacies, knowing that, at one level of my existence, my love still existed and thrived. Somehow my message got through, I was sure, as I too got her message of love and tenderness.

I have felt this way often during the years of my late maturity. At such moments, time itself did not seem to exist; I was just I, she was the one I had always known, our love for one another was immanent as it kept perpetrating itself above and beyond the passing of the years.

I used to play my piano often, usually some romantic pieces by Chopin or Liszt or Beethoven; I played to an audience, to an audience of one, I played for Her. I would try to put my soul into my interpretation of the music, as I had then. I dedicated to her a Nocturne I had composed for her; I tried to render my longing in the "Pathetique", or the "Moonshine" sonata. Like then, when she was indeed the listener, I impressed my whole feeling into the piece I performed, I imagining her to be present. I fancied she not only heard, but she also felt the emotions I was imparting to my music..

My love for Hedi has been my lifelong neurosis. I repressed it at first, and kept it hidden in my unconscious, so as to not let it interfere with the actuality of life as it unfolded: family, work, wife and children, economics, daily planning. There were times when the neurosis surfaced, and I would engage in day dreaming, dreaming of a renewal of our relationship, regardless of the realities that kept us apart. For a while it possessed me, like a malady, like an overlay of fiction mingling with my daily life. In a more actual way, I would imagine ways of visiting Coberg, the town Hedi and I had been in together.

*******

I play whatever game of which I am a pawn. I let myself be pushed on the board that is my life. I see others around me, playing their part in the same game; I see how they move on the checkered surface, kings and jumpers, towers or simple soldiers.

I am the stranger viewing the exotica of existence, striding through the avenues of impossibly far-away places. Someone told me I was born here, another remind me that I loved a girl that lived there. As of this instant, it is to me as if I never came to a world of which I am only a witness, and feelings regarding that world and its denizens remain foreign to me.

I take my pen and I am writing words, phrases, thoughts that float within the confines of my inner Universe. I try to write about you, but it seems that my writing only concerns me. Maybe it is the same in the end? My consciousness is a glimmer of the given moment, which I set into traces on this surface and I call those traces letters. That way the glimmer lingers a little longer, as if I left a marker in time, and then it starts fading away as duration ends.

I am a stranger in the landscape of my existence. Shadows emerge from the fogs of nothingness, they stay a while and plunge back into that same oblivion, dissipating like smoke attesting to a smoldering and dying glow, retreating slowly as it begins its dissolution; then it is no more. Only I am left. But who am I?

I am the spirit of my thinking self, an echo of what I was, with no particular identity as of this Renee and only the vaguest perception of my Being. What I was counts for naught here, because it is unnecessary that I be anyone in particular at this instant. I simply am, spirit, echo, myself, no one in particular, yet so filled of the remembrance of those that were with me, that it becomes meaningless to seek the singularity of my own persona any more.

I place my marks on this sheet, asking if those words, those phrases, those ideas are of any relevance to my being what I am meant to be. They add little to the sequence, to the cycles and the phenomena that I sense. I am a stranger to any continuity, to any of the wheels of destiny, to the course of the things that I fancy keep unfolding in the realms.

I am, and all that lies beyond my Essence is a fancy, mine, my game, my capricious doing, my own act of creating. I do, then I act so that I may undo. I implement multitudes of ideas, or else I let them stray at one or any level of my fancying. What I deal with presently is like a self-reflecting thought, as I create structures and collect words and phrases and ideas. I let them stream through the ether of my virtual intellect, fixate them into letters and notions, using pen and paper. What I write is the precipitation of my capriciousness, the product of my fantasy, of my restless being. I am, I become, then I undo and I find myself back to the stage of just being, as the glimmer ceases to glow.

My path grows narrower and shorter. Looking back, I see the shadows of those others I once met; they catch up with me and stride toward the goal of all life. I look at them, closing my eyes, unwilling to agree as yet to what they are seeing. I find myself as well among those senescent shapes, those travesties. Why! I force myself to realize that our common youth has been left far behind as death has begun to enter my reality. I need to face up now to what reality keeps telling me.