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CALLASSA
L’amore è vita. Nient’altro conta
under construction
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Callassa is the true beauty
I began admiring the butterflies and wild coloured petals on the silk and shiny surface of her bikini. I envisioned watching her remove this garment and discarding it, doing so carefully. She is untypically mindful with her garments, whatever the circumstance. I watched her on a Paris street during a winter evening not long ago and while she had been standing and looking through a glass window of a boutique. On display were what she’d told me later were ‘feelings of butterflies’. These ‘butterflies’ were trying to weave disengagement from the fact that they were short lived. Though what she had said was difficult for me to understand because the butterflies were not real, it stayed with me. Everything she says does remain.
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Love is all. There is nothing else
My name is Christopher Lawrence. I am 64 years old and reside in the city of Dorchester, which is in the county of Dorset. England. I am employed as a sales representative, manager actually, and that’s sufficient to bore anyone to death. Without going further and say I sell hardware (tools for DIY enthusiasts). Really, it’s not so fascinating, is it? Huh. Well, allow me to dwell on something that is, fascinating, I mean, incredible even, serendipitous. I thought so and still do and I cannot see ‘things’ otherwise.
While a younger thing, do you like the description, I had a penchant for traveling around the rural areas of the north and in particular the Fens, of Lincolnshire to be precise. It used to be named the East Riding, the county I mean. I am single at the moment, my wife of late decided that a different beau better satisfied her needs, or according to her satisfied them at all, a younger one and she took the now grown up kids with her. A boy and a girl.
I know I know, hurry up and get on with it, you are thinking. And, I shall mention the fact of a metabolic problem that causes me pain and began when I was about fifty. Don’t take more than the dosage of pain-killers, which were my orders from the doctor.
Anyways, forget all of that, including the stupid bungalow I recently moved into which is god awful compared to my previous bit of history with its winding staircase, four post bed and marble floors.
Going back to what I said about being a young thing; enjoying the rural landscapes, especially the flat areas with the canals and artful aspects of early evening I can say, made by moments made bliss and which tended to dwell on the senses. You know the kind of thing, stays in the mind.
There was a certain spot I did fall upon, close to a village called Saxilby and which is on the road to Lincoln, the historic city. I’m referring to where I once stopped my car to absorb the canal and the natural splendour of what was a beautiful summer day. Now then, I have to tell you that there was a beautiful river boat or barge as they call them that was drifting slowly past, prompting me to get out of my car to get a better view. What captivated me beyond the splendid wooden boat and the purring of its engine is there was a woman attired in a bikini lying thereupon and she was a totally wonderful addition, sunbathing, uncaring that someone might see her above the reeds, passers-by and so on. I wanted to be part of the picture before me, and the wanting, the acute yearning for the embrace in totality subsequently became unrelenting. Strange you might think because I only saw her for a minute or two. She made me want to be free of this lifestyle and well, whatever. It was a dream if you want, spurred on by her, whoever she was.
There was something, or should I say a great deal more that remained with me and varying as it did in frequency and intensity. The image of her lying upon the boat would appear in my thoughts often, even during inopportune moments. So what of it, you might wonder. I mean I gave it nothing by way of understanding, away in distance and time, this mental portrait I had kept.
What’s it like to move slowly upon the water, to be so beautiful, naked amid the celestial gift of life. Who was she? What did she do and where had she been going? These were considerations that often touched me. Who wouldn’t be touched?
Allow me to move on quickly. After my divorce I thought about what I used to enjoy the absolute most and one day while at a meeting that in the scheme of things was just a ploy to think of ways to fascinate (men in particular) who buy a house and live in it forever to buy our stuff. Hollow, yes and not fulfilling in the least despite being told that it was. Sales figures and all.
I wanted to make time to travel ‘up north’ as they say, not so far away really, perhaps head to Norwich or Lincoln, or both. The solitude and silent soliloquies beckoned. Then it did occur to me that I could take that same route and stop by the sign to Saxilby and see the canal again. Was it a good idea because it could well conflict with how I remembered it, wanted to remamber it, that particular womanly flavour with which it was so very deeply imbued, which obviously would be absent because time shifts on. Does it not and what was fabulous becomes modern housing attired as something else. You do see that sort of thing quite often. People, namely the beautiful woman getting old, gosh a terrible thought.
So I did just that, I took a week sick leave and headed toward the places I hadn’t been to for decades, the quaint tea shops, cafes, pubs and hotels. While driving it did occur to me that other things had gotten in the way of what I had really loved to do, that I should not have allowed this to be the case and this sentiment was plaguing me now I was here again. Well it had always plagued me but now more than ever. Here, yes here, the roads which were not so busy and there was no hustle and bustle, no demands on me, no wife and she should be here too, but chose not to be.
Have you noticed how cigarettes make sweet aromatic plumes while in the clear and the bright air. Perhaps noise frightens the plumes away? What month are we on, hmmm. July obviously, and the fifteenth to be precise, almost midday. I was trying to remember when I had been here before, it had been midsummer, just like today. I was happy and why wouldn’t everyone be?
Then I saw the sign, the same sign that told of a village to the left further down that road, if one chose to take it, instead of carrying on to Lincoln and while I was trying my best to recall the cathedral spire, reaching to the sky, I moved off the road and came to a halt. Was this the exact same spot? I didn’t know whether it was or not, but for some reason it felt like it was. As I said, there is always the expectation that nothing remains the same because it can’t. I stood looking over the reeds and towards the canal. Suddenly there was a barge moving past and I was moved to tears to think this lifestyle hadn’t gone away. No. Then I saw the same barge, it was the same one and I wasn’t making it that way because I yearned for it to be or anything of the sort. Upon the barge was the woman wearing the bikini and she was exactly as I had remembered her. I hurried to my car so to retrieve my phone and catch the image before it moved on. Alas the phone wouldn’t function and then I saw that the time on my wristwatch was 12.00, significant because it had remained at that while I’d been hurrying with the stupid technology I had in my hand. I walked quickly back to my prior spot and connected with the scene of her beautiful legs and the way she was laid. There was an explanation, something simple, but I couldn’t think of one. I would eventually though, wouldn’t I?
Yes, the time on my wristwatch was stationary as it was showing on my phone. I decided to drive further along and follow the canal, staying with the barge. That’s a ‘C reg’. car I just saw, how old was that? Then another past by me that wasn’t a new car but it was. My heart was beating like a kettle drum and I was in a haze of imponderables, emergent was the question I’d asked throughout the years; who was she? Was I happy? Was I afraid? Was I merely dreaming having fallen asleep in my car, my heap of junk while parked? It wouldn’t be the first time.
I had suddenly lost sight of the barge because the road veered away. I was undecided, stunned, confused, cheated of seeing her again….again…I mean, was I accepting the fact of this being somehow real? That I had even see her at all? I stopped and with that thought in mind decided to head back and also not mention this to anyone for obvious reasons. I sell ladders, not fall off them. I returned to the spot where I had been before. I got out from the confines of my car and which was how it had seemed, oddly very confining, I mean..
I would love to describe the moments of my short journey back to this spot by the reeds. How my thoughts were bountiful with altogether novel facets. I was chasing after a woman who hadn’t aged after decades, was fabulously beautiful and had seemingly forever been with me. Wishful thinking, the latter.
Oh my gosh I was beset by a multiplicity of feelings; of fear, terror and helplessness . I knew there was someone behind me, very close, I knew not what.
‘Christopher Lawrence. What might you want?’
I had turned, successfully holding my bladder’s desire to leak, and was facing her, the woman from the barge. It was her, I was certain. It was really her.
I had no answer though in sooth, it had been her that I was looking for. I had been looking for her for decades and seen her in everything, it hadn’t been intermittent pictures as previously I stated. I knew it so.
I couldn’t answer, only gaze into her blue eyes, their depth, their infinitude. I felt wrapped by the fragrance made by the sun’s warmth upon her body.
‘Christopher. What might you want?’
The most succinct reply would have been, thus, ‘I want you.’
She took my hand and held my fingers against her lips, all the time maintaining her eyes connection.
Then as a swift plume of sense it dawned on me that this woman was wondering why I was watching her and that any similarity with who I’d seen before was mere coincidence. She had a right to ask. Yes, that was it.
Could she be hostile, dangerous, even, while standing in her bikini, her undeniable beauty on display, the midday sun seeming to write poetry upon and around her.
My prior mind wandering and conclusion arrived at, was wrong, completely wrong. I had dismissed from my mind the fact that there was no time.
I began to articulate something, ‘I was admiring your….’
I was going to say barge but she cut me short and also moved closer. Now she was almost touching me and her fragrance was as a splendid and rejuvenating mist. Gosh, she was beautiful. Was I somehow normalising this, actually not at all. She was beautiful but what on earth was she, here, in this way? Had I been seeking her, wishing she was here, the phantasm I had seen all that time gone and had fixed in my very cells? Was this the same event because time was stilled and effectively that first glimpse of her was so.
You haven’t asked me how I know your name and the answer to your inner questioning is no, it’s much, much more than that. I can tell you but I would be unsubtle to forge the sense of your lifetime here.’
What was I to say, to think, to do?
‘I knew you were alone and wishing upon the image of me in your thoughts, the unwavering thoughts.’
Then I spluttered the first thing I I could and it was pathetic. It was as though I were a listener of my own voice. I had swallowed her breath and doing so invigorated me in ways I couldn’t even begin to describe. She knew.
Could she be some kind of ‘being’ who had commandeered my thinking, my emotions, my wanting…and reproduced them? How fantastic was that and in addition, would this not make her the same woman I had seen here? I hadn’t the compulsion to wonder upon the realisation that it didn’t matter at all. I was the most fortunate person ever and should respect her for this bestowment.
‘I am not in singularity,’ was what she said and while gazing into my eyes, holding them, fixed.
I was in complete subjugation of her, and would remain so and in this novel condition I was changed completely.
“I want to know all about you,” I mumbled, and it was very true, I did.
“With no haste, you will become of the understanding that I can create. You can never leave and love is all, nothing else matters.”
Her statement was very powerful in its capacity to demolish and to rebuild. What would I be leaving and why would I want to? My life had morphed into a pretty dull time, now it was changing extremely quickly in ways I would never have conceived in a wild fantasy, a delusion. Love…Love is all things…
Then I wanted to touch her, to take a strand of her hair, to tell her she was divine.
“Christopher Lawrence. Nature loves the ones who respect her. Love is all. There is nothing else. I am nature. I am love. I am more than it is possible to show, here, now. You never discarded me. You were inspired and fulfilled throughout the passing. I was to you; fortitude, life’s meaning amid the smile of the sky, the joy enveloping within the infinite dark.”
She was silent and after the moment’s passing she said,” I have made your life my own.The magical feeling loosened from within me has sustained you. Now, your life has both ended and begun……Come with me, come now.”
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CALLASSA
L’amore è vita. Nient’altro conta
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The magical feeling loosened from within me has sustained you.
Now, your life has both ended and begun.
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copyright (c) mmxxiv callassa
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L’amore è vita. Nient’altro conta
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under construction
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CALLASSA
L’amore è vita. Nient’altro conta