The Story of Delphine

They change their skies but not their souls who run across the sea (Horace)

It was an early evening in spring when I felt my waters breaking. Rushed to hospital I entered the entrance hall and left a wet trail all along the brand new blue carpet.
"That's how little mermaids arrive, I thought.
Soon after Delphine landed into our world and took her first gasps of air. She was born easily, without fuss and took to our world like a fish to water.
Nature embraced the lovely new flower. I've never before seen so many butterflies fluttering around a baby. They searched her out, flew in clouds around her face introducing a new colour one after the other and faster and faster to feed her with snippets of our beautiful world. Our kittens were constantly climbing into her pram to look at her and tickled her with their tails. I had to watch them like a hawk and chase them away, as there was a real danger of suffocation. It also, of course, contravened all sense of hygiene.
The whole world seemed to take an active part by introducing itself to her. It was palpable. The weather had become much nicer, the sun took an effort. Flowers opened prematurely and our fifty-year-old double camelia was exaggerating: hundreds of bright red flowers were blooming as if just for her. There was a beautiful scent in the garden after a rainstorm. When she was sleeping in her cot I had the windows wide open to let this perfume waft all over her. That might have triggered the beginning of her lifelong love affair with aromas and scents.
Like a fragile plant Delphine needed constant attention. She kept us busy day and night and was a real prima donna of a child. Not only did she need feeding more often than other babies, but also sought eye to eye contact. She wanted to be near us, touching, pulling and forever asking. We endlessly had to explain things and also sing to her. She adored music and made up little dances that she performed gracefully in her little white tou-tou dress. Never for a moment could she be left or play on her own. When any one of us was out of her view she felt abandoned. Then she came running, her little face all sad, and wanted to be held, cuddled, and loved.
For me, a busy mother with a toddler son, a big house and garden, it was not always easy to let everything go at once and devote myself uniquely to her. From early on she showed determination. If she wanted something, she made sure she got it. There was no way past it, as we should find out in the future. The signs were there for it early on, yet nobody was fully aware of them.
What happened to her in later life seemed to have been prepared for her from eternity, all the implications of causes came from there, spinning the threads of her being. She told me, she was especially sent from heaven to us, as she had chosen her parents carefully herself before she was born. I often wonder why us, not the easiest of all couples, and I probably will never find an answer to it. But now I think she might be right after all and everything had a purpose and was meant to be.

When Delphine was little, she often talked to me about the two small blue boys who were coming to play with her. The strange thing was, they just entered through the wall, never needed a door to meet her. As soon as she wished them, they were there. I, of course, could not see them but was sure I heard laughter and voices coming from her room. Always in need of company she suddenly seemed happy to stay there alone and I imagine that they played together and had fun. This had gone on for many months when Delphine, my little mermaid, as I called her teasingly, also developed a passion for water. Nothing made her happier than to sit in a bucket of cool water and splash it around with ripples of laughter. She learnt to swim effortlessly. I took her to baby swimming class where she proved a natural. Without fear she jumped into the deep end and doggy paddled in circles shrieking with joy while protesting loudly when we took her out to dry. "Water was one of the first words she could say, and the second was "Perfume.
Delphine never has been an easy child. She was like a whirlwind in our lives, disruptive but refreshing. It was her unusual behaviour that puzzled us. Whatever we said to her was ignored. There were the things she discarded. She did not put them into bins like a normal person, but everything, that she felt hat served its use, she threw out of the window into the garden, books she had read, small coins, unwanted gifts and dead flowers. She considered the outside as a huge compost heap where things would rot and fertilise the soil. It took a lot of my time to tidy up her mess. She listened to me with patient smiles but somehow never seemed to understand the effect of her action. She lived in her own world, saying she knew it all as she had learnt it before in an earlier life. What was important to us had lesser significance for her or none at all. I had trouble coping with this rebelliousness and was trying to find an answer for it. Slowly I came to realise that there was one, and a very significant one indeed. Delphine was sent to us for a reason. She had come to us to assess our ability to cope with difficulties and to test our endurance.

One day after another confrontation I was at my wits' end. In my sleep I called all my ancestors, the ones who had gone but were still talking to me in my dreams, my grandfather the Scoundrel and my beloved grandmother.
"How will I cope with this disruptive and rebellious child? I cried. But the answer came from elsewhere. I cannot describe it. It was a voice out of a beautiful light that talked to me:
"She still is an uncut diamond, just wait. I woke up and thought about it. Somehow I felt calmer and reassured.
At seventeen and with a bad school record Delphine told us:
"I think, mum, my teachers know everything but I know other things.
She felt she had to travel to see what was further ahead. There were things that interested her: the meaning of heaven, the many voices of the mind, the difference between countries and the power of love.
"Don't worry, mum, she said packing her Givenchy bag, "when I'll be back I'll tell you all about it.

After she left, the house seemed very still but the quietness was suffocating, at least for the first few days. My husband, who hardly speaks anyway, was even quieter, the cockatoo stopped chirping and the dog seemed to constantly walk with his tail between the legs, his sad eyes guarding her bedroom door. He had been allowed to sleep on her bed and probably was missing her scent and her stormy touch, always all over him. Whenever he wanted to sit quietly, she was prodding his ears, grabbing and stroking him.

For a long time we did not hear from Delphine. She lived in a Kibbutz in Israel, walked the beaches in Sicily and was seen riding on a camel around the pyramids. The sole purpose for her was to throw her light into the darkness of mere being. To be or not to be was her answer. She belly-danced on a boat on the Nile, spent time in Rome, climbed mountains in Crete and looked after children in the US. Languages came easily to her. She could converse with people in their own tongue, the Arabs in Beirut as the Jews in Jerusalem. Syntax and grammar were of no importance, as long as she could make herself understood. When I asked after her experiences, and what and who was important for her, she would say to me things like:
" It is not you or I that is important, mum. Not who we might be or how we became what we are. It is being awake, discovering a place. When I feel life laughing and crying around me...
Life certainly wrapped around her, but also sorted her out. Wherever she went she made an impact. She "felt people and their personalities and looked beyond casual conversation trying to find a deeper meaning in everything. Very emotional, she searched for the heartbreak in the heart of things. She was interested of what made people behave in the way they did and why men were put onto earth. Her mind never stopped looking for explanations and answers.
She collected all kind of religions and, curiously, found she could believe in them all. Important for her were Angels. She kind of trusted in them and was sure her guardian angel was protecting her.
I asked her: "How does he look like? Is he perhaps part of you, your alter ego?
The difference from her and an angel was easy. She said.
"Most of an Angel is in the inside and most of me one sees on the outside.
She also believed in the influence of the stars, made them responsible for imbalances in her character, as if she was difficult by necessity, a victim of heavenly compulsion, dominated by the spheres around her. I could not argue with that. Just did not find words for it. Who would?
In her quest to see the world, Delphine seemed to me like a child playing at a sea shore diverting herself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before her.
There were also the men.
Everywhere she went there were always men on the prowl and her beauty and spontaneity made her an easy target. But just when they thought they had caught her, she somehow got the upper hand, made her escape or befriended them. She liked her men strong and childish and as there is always a child in a man and as she was good with children, she manipulated all of them.
Some told that she had changed their life.
I received flowers and phone calls for her from all over the world. People, who had known her, never forgot and wanted to speak to her again. Being back from abroad she found jobs easily but they did not last, just earned enough to finance her next travel. Her butterfly spirit was addicted to the nectar of foreign adventures, her heart wide open for everything and everyone. There always has been a contradiction in her mental make-up. On one hand Delphine was highly self-centred and in love with herself, (one cannot love others before one can love oneself) and on the other she would help anybody giving her last money to beggars on the street.
One just had to look for the angel in her.