“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”—Maria Rilke
They rested together beneath a sky of late-winter stars, Cancer low on the horizon and Aries’ fire high above.
“Do you ever feel that all of life could be a romance?” he asked, “a love story to be written and made in mind and acts?”
She thought of her life, the banality of every day, of all the non-exceptional that pervaded moments days and spans of time it seemed. Where was the romance in that?
“I think you’re over-romanticizing,” she answered.
“Maybe,” he responded, thinking and considering little her dismissal of her thought.
“How often do we come across another that catches our interest, who holds our eye or plants a seed of thought? They are in and out of life, then gone forever; or maybe they return again with greater place and role—one we can’t see when first touched and drawn.”
She listened, enjoying when he shared his mind, but did not see or agree with his train of thought.
“What would life become, instead of dismissing the affection, we pursued it further: sought to learn those who seem to touch us, the faces and souls that stand out of a malaise in world that seeks to draw and keep us in? The malaise, it steals the romance of existence, the existential and immanent that blinds us to a Greater we are meant to find.”
“Don’t you start every day ankle-deep in cowshit?” she teased.
“No,” he laughed, “I read…and then I stand in cowshit. Doing so, I’ve learned to move whole herds simply by knowing where to stand. Silent and without coercion I can move masses by simply aligning and acting in accordance to their nature. I watch the sun rise. I watch it fall. I see the sky change, and in late nights, how the stars and planets change. I would miss all of that if I wasn’t standing in cowshit or working in the dirt. Soil is the better word—because it’s not dead. It’s living.”
Her cheeks reddened. She meant to check his vision and, instead, found him hopefully lost. He could find a romanticism to anything if given long enough to think, and in his solitary work: time and thoughts were endless.
“But where is the romance in skies and stars?” she countered. “Doesn’t romance need a relationship? Doesn’t it need response?”
“The response doesn’t have to be words, and it doesn’t have to be as we expect or desire. The response is affection.
Why do people travel the world just to be alone with them? Is that not a love, a desire to see and be among them uninhibited with the depressions of false lights and haste? Is that not a romance—to be alone and among and to see them as they truly are? And when you witness, are there not times we are affected; and, though it doesn’t make sense when said, as if they speak to us a certain way? Isn’t that why we are here right now?”
It was. The admission led her to consider more his thoughts.
In wondering, she asked, “And what of the strangers that stand out? Where is the romance of someone you’ve never seen, may never see again, and yet sense something in their momentary presence?”
He smiled, “Same as the stars—mystery.”
She laughed, “That makes no sense.”
“It’s not supposed to. Life with all the answers eliminates the Wonder. Life is not a science, no matter all we do to try and make it so. Life is an art: an expression of our souls. Maybe, when touched by another, what we are seeing is the light—soul and romance—in them.
Maybe the souls that affect us—even for the briefest moment—all have a purpose.
Maybe flippant affections are not distractions, drawing us like moths from flame to flame, fluttering lost until ruinous immolation.
Instead of immolation, maybe the light and affections of others guide us on our way; a path we don’t see or understand until discovering we are there—whatever and wherever there is.”
“What is there to you?”
“Purpose—discovery of an eternal romance?”
“How do you find the purpose and make meaning?”
“Live and see,” he answered plain.
She saw it then, a glow showing through the shadow of his eyes in the weak light of late-winter stars. It seemed not a reflection of sky, but an emanation from within.
He shared further, “When I was young, I mistook many affections as desires of the flesh. I thought—if drawn to a face and smile and warmth of another—it must be because I wanted something from it. I did not see the beauty was to appreciate and love the experience of closeness; to create a desire to give and share—not to take.
Not seeing, I felt ugly. I hid and averted those to whom I was drawn, suppressing affections and affinities because I didn’t yet understand.”
“Didn’t understand what?”
“That there was more to it. That there was something there of spirit: a warmth and kindness I could sense, and from that, I was affected by the rest of all they were.
The world is filled with people dressed, made up, and reconstructed to be beautiful in the ways of world and lusts, but I never feel something beautiful, wondrous, in manicured sensual sameness. Spirit is the difference, and when we begin to see that in others—open to that first—soul affections begin to light everywhere, and the distractions of what the world calls beauty fall away.”
“So you don’t see anything in the wonders of a woman’s form?” she disbelieved, knowing him too well.
He laughed, “You know I do, but without the spirit, expression of a deeper beauty, where is the affection?
She teased, drawing down on the collar of her shirt, the skin of her upper chest and top of cleft revealing for his view.
“That is an expression of its own,” he answered, fixed to her sign and offering, “and you know I am affected.”
She kissed him soft, affected in the warmth of his lips, the split of his tongue through hers: their match and find of rhythm held through subtle movements of opening and offering of selves.
She was affected.
Breaking from their kiss, she asked, “Now what?”
He smiled, soul glow still emanant in his eyes, “Live and see.”
Beneath the stars, through cool of the night, they warmed together, affected in lived romance, immersed in the light and spirit of the other: affected, illumed, drawn ever nearer to the eternal romance of hope and dream.