Is it possible to fall in love with an abstraction?

I allowed myself to fall in love with only a single fragment of the whole, an insignificant fraction of a form who in her lucidity still haunts me.

It was as if, in that very moment, when I let my emotion be stifled by some sort of meek prudence, I had been permitted to briefly glimpse the incomparable flesh of Venus; only to have shut my eyes and turned my head away. For such is the effect of divinity upon my soul; humility. Or at least self consciousness.

Mnemosyne became my executioner, each time in recalling the elegance of that unknown seraph I felt the blade of fate, majestic in its uncompromising power, come crashing down upon me.

My obsession; a seemingly weightless encounter, bearing only the significance which a desperate mind might bind to it. One amongst a million others, and upon retrospection, or introspection I might say, from the rest it should have been no different.

A statuesque profile, turned subtly, teasingly, away, so that all I could see was the delicate curve of her neck, half blanketed with silken hair. Tortuously stubborn in resisting my stifled desire for it to turn, for she to reveal her angelic countenance. Instead she lay her head against the ageing glass, asleep, or staring off into the vast landscape outside. A little book of poetry lay forgotten on the floor beside her; I think it was Baudelaire, the faded gilt lettering was too worn to tell.

The gravity of that encounter struck me as thus; that journey was a verse, my life a canto, but she was the poem.

On that day I remember little else. The train rambled on into the vast expanse which is the East like a sentence gradually diminishing into silence, screeching through the dust and heat, steadfast pistons beating an unvarying cadence. Onward, to Baghdad. Leaving my old world behind to resume its lethargy.

I remember no details within the car aside from that alluring ghost.

Idler on the Roof

January 22, 2011 at 12:51 AM PST

Man, this is deep.