Ever-fixed

His love was old, ancient even,
For he was older than she, but she didn’t care.
She always preferred antique wear and tear to out-of-the box shininess.
In her 23, he stood more than six feet in his 49.
She had to throw her head back to look up into his granite face.
And, oh, how she loved him.
She can still close her eyes and find herself in his arms,
Dancing to an old Sinatra tune in the middle of a crowded restaurant,
On a snowy night four days before Christmas.
It was a sinless moment, fraught with the breath of sin.
He was so magnificent in his grace and coolness.
He was the fresh Atlantic to her roaring fires of hell.
He was the soft ocean air to her sweet Calvin Klein perfume.
He was all East Coast god-like glory and she was mid-Western girl next door.
The odds of it working were slim to none.
In fact, it never did,
But that’s what makes it a real love story.
It’s true; she did love him once.
It’s still written on the pavement everywhere.
She loved him with a flame that lit up her cheeks when he spoke.
She loved him like congregants love church.
She loved him blindly and with faith;
Faith in the fact that her love was a wound,
A stain on her life and her soul.
But there truly was no reversing it.
He was an artist, you see.
They were of the same kind and breed.
He wrote his love upon her with his eyes.
She tattooed his name on her soul.
Music hummed in their veins,
And books lined their shelves.
They hungered for nothing more
And would accept nothing less.
Their passion is still an ever-fixed mark on the universe.
The angels furrow their brows at the thought.
She loves him still, you know.
It’s whispered all over that little town she lived in once –
The town where she met him one sunny, April afternoon.
He shook her hand in that moment and gave her no other thought,
But days later he found her sitting at a desk in his office,
Her long, dark hair spilling around her shoulders,
Her deep eyes staring up at him as he spoke to her.
He liked the innocence in her that hinted at something darker;
It played on her skin like waves on the shore of his hometown.
He liked her energy and her ideas, and the soft curves of her body.
She liked his graceful hands, his intense eyes, and his salt and pepper hair.
She liked the way he sang quietly to himself, the way he frowned, and
The way he smoked enough cigarettes in an hour to fill an ashtray.
She loved to listen to him talk about swimming in the sea as a boy.
You can still hear them there…
Her laughter echoes off the etched glass windows.
His soft, deep voice rolls like far away thunder off the copper walls.
You can see their shadows if you go there;
Go to that little restaurant where they spent two years together – 
Where he spent hours teaching her to manage the accounts;
Where they spent hours shoulder to shoulder;
Where she sat perched on the edge of his desk night after night,
Watching him loop his ties and button his crisp, white dress shirts.
All at once, she was lost in the maze of his life;
His cuff links, his polished shoes, his charcoal gray sweater…
His favorite things, like used cars, the ocean, and movie soundtracks…
She lived on the border of heaven and hell to be near him.
The tension in her body was so strong it nearly snapped her spine.
It took all of her strength to refrain from kissing him each morning.
Everything was fragile then;
As frail as a dried leaf,
And she waited constantly for it to end terribly.
She guarded her love of him jealously.
No one could know.
It would have been the death of both their lives.
She would rather spend her days in silence and heartache,
Longing for fulfillment of the deepest kind,
Than be present in a day devoid of his face.
Her life bloomed and grew happily with each moment.
Everything was fragrant and glowing.
He turned 50 that November.
For Christmas, she gave him her heart in a black, velvet box.
For Valentine’s Day, his gift was a sunlit smile through a frosted window.
They watched the seasons roll by without a care.
And then, as she had known all along he would be, he was gone.
The hole in her heart was his exact shape.
The emptiness in her eyes was reserved for him.
The voice in her head wouldn’t go away.
She was haunted but couldn’t say a word.
She carried the grief deep in her chest
And listened as others told her about his life –
His travels, his adventures, his endeavors, the things that made him smile.
How she longed to be there for those moments,
But her mouth stayed closed.
Only her eyes gave away her secret longing.
They glowed like dark coals at the mention of his name.
They still do.
She loves him still, you know.
Her love eternally sparkles in the trees in that little town, like Christmas lights,
And it always will.
He turned 58 last month, and she watched him smile electronically.
She gazed with adoration upon his aristocratic countenance; his sweet, lined face
And loved most the photo of him smoking and gazing out at the water at sunset.
Wherever he was, he was happy,
And she would never want anything other than that.
She’ll love him forever, you see,
Because her love doesn’t die like so many other people’s.
Once it is in her blood, it remains.
She will die with his face behind her eyelids.