Always in Shadow; Seeking the Light

It’s so true, it’s so manifestly something, that it becomes a cliché.  But clichés exist for a reason, these truths that have budded inside the human mind and bloomed. And so, it wears this proudly, like elegant clothes, something precious, something earned: the matter: that you can never go back.

And yet you can, can’t you?

This is the thing. Time stretches so far, both directions, pinpointing off into horizons where it becomes invisible, barely imagined, barely remembered. A light and a darkness that hem us in at such a distance that we hardly notice them most of the time. And in this wide gap: we live.

And so, I do go back. Though the years have been beyond count, and some of the memories have dimmed and dimmed into obsolescence, into something less than obsolescence, into shadows cast by no object, having no shape or context, scrabbling at failing sentience. Disappearing. It takes many years, it takes hundreds, but over that time the image fades and tints, it dog-ears, and fine lines insinuate themselves. Walking across the field feels like walking across it for the first time, going somewhere I have never been before.

The house stands. The lines are not the way I remember, not exactly. And it’s less that time has changed them, so much as it has changed me. And far more than it had thought. At what point did I shed enough memories to become a creature of modernity? At the turn of a century? Which one?

But what I see now is the workings of history, the grandeur of a bygone age, a structure that looks bigger and airier, and darker, older, wetter, more faded into the backdrop of nature. And still, there are some things that don’t change. This mixture of gold and citrus light, matched up against shadows that are warm and earthy; sepia mixed with caramel mixed with ebony mixed with rust. Such fine savoury colours that flow through the earth, through the flora, into the structure itself. Windows that are lead-lined and carved into tiny little blocks, but still catch the sun, still twinkle it into the atmosphere. Swathes of reds and yellows and greens and saturated browns: this is the landscape. A work of art.

And that’s fitting. Since it was art that had brought me here.

I am ashamed to say that I lost you. That over the years I let go. Or a ran ahead. Or I dawdled while you ran ahead. I lit candles while you embraced electric lights, rode trains and planes as you galloped on horseback. We: never quite aligned.

How long has it been now? Five hundred years? Well, it must be nearing that.

I walked into that gallery, not much more than a month ago. Such a drop in the ocean, that. And there were these paintings, these art works offering up a landscape, a village, acres of memories. A small signature at the right bottom corner, just a twist of paint, a flourish followed by a scribble. But I’d know it anywhere.

“Hello?” I call it into the expansive, dense air.

Is there something moving inside, framed in one of those windows?

I knock on the door, hand poised, ready to knock again.

But you stand there, as if you’ve been waiting here, as if time has had no meaning for the last few centuries, as if ships have never sunk, battles been unfought, rockets never flown to the moon.

“Joanna.”

“You haven’t forgotten.”

“I don’t forget.”

No, not you. You have a perfect memory, and a perfect paintbrush, and you bring the world to life with it, the shadows and the light, the many colours and contradictions that are building blocks of both.

“Come in,” you say.

I do.

“Tea?” you say.

“I would.”

We sit out there in the space that was once a courtyard, at another time a library.

“How do you still live here?” I ask you at last.

“I am quiet. I stay out of the way.”

“Aren’t you lonely?”

“I’m accompanied by a sea of memories. The house may be silent, but my head isn’t. You parade around in my head all the time, making your noises, your music. You never fail to be with me, not any one of you.”

I toy with you, or do you with me? “But one face. One voice…”

You suggest a half smile. “Perhaps. Just a little bit brighter than the rest. A little clearer.”

“Different.”

“Special.”

“I’m here now.”

“You ran away.”

“I don’t remember. Precisely. Was it I who ran from you?”

“I remember. Precisely. And it was.”

“But I’m here now.” And ‘now’ is a relative term, because I can’t promise how long. I can’t make a map of eternity, I can’t guess at the way the future is going to unfold, and how I’m likely to react to it. You can. I suspect that. You do see the future as clearly as the past, a memory as surely looking forwards as back. You can recall what’s happened and what will happen. No doubt you remember the last conversation in its exactitude, and can catalogue each failure of understanding that I have committed. In your perfection I don’t doubt at all that you can see all my glaring, laughable, condemnable imperfections. You know what brought me here, and you know when and why I’ll leave. ‘Here.’ ‘Now.’ A limited undertaking. In the silence I tell you: “I found you through the art work. A gallery in London.”

“Oh. And it made you come?”

“You’re still a master.”

“You still flatter easily.”

An accusation? Just a statement of fact? But I push a little harder. “I mean what I say. And I mean this too. I want to remain. Can I stay with you?”

You lay one hand upon mine. “Always.”

Another relative term. So much has melted and changed over the years. But the sun is still blood-silver, heated with a sharp, soft orange; the blue still suffuses into the sunset like a mist. The darkness still blooms cunningly from beneath the colour, becoming the colour, and slowly eating it up. Light and dark, glare and shadow, enmeshed in their perpetual dance. Morphing so much more slowly than all else, even the mountains.

All except you.

And we sink down into each other’s shadows, into the haze of fading daytime. Together, anyway, for a while.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work