Love waiting

 

 

For you, anno, a compromise—humor with depth.

 

 

It was so beautiful, such a real and moving experience, that if you were to ask me this instant, I would tell you that I, Juliet, have only just come from Verona as high as the moon from the greatest love I have ever known.  I would tell you my heart is bursting with the ripeness of that love, and I fear that it will indeed burst and that I will die along with the all-consuming fire of the passion that wastes me blissfully away.  For what good is a mere soul, an ethereal thing, even singing with the angels and communing with God, if it cannot burn with and be sated by the hottest fire of human love’s passion?

 

And now even as I ponder the strange events that unfolded that night, I would tell you I would relive the whole glorious experience again.  I would find favor with Romeo at the very same masquerade ball and when he came before me to address me, his eyes would all but leap into mine and mine into his, just as they did that night.  And in this miraculous conjoining, eternal love would again show itself to us and unfurl our destinies before us, a golden scroll unrolling and undulating magnificently.  And this scroll stopping short as it did that night, I would again allow, if its continuation, seeming the more good and natural thing, meant we would never have met at all.  That I was called away from the ball at that moment, and Romeo, too, explained well this interruption, this tiny wrinkle in the fabric of time.

 

Later that evening, I had moved outside onto the balcony off my bedroom to be alone as I pondered the vision of the scroll and as my heart cried out for my beloved Romeo.  I swear it had been my heart that cried, but it must, too, have been my voice, for Romeo appeared, standing handsomely at the edge of the orchard below me in the bit of light shed by my lamps.  I was at once beside myself with joy and shaken by his audacity to have scaled the orchard wall and to have beheld me there in my nightclothes assuming safety in the darkness of my aloneness.

 

“How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?” I asked, hands to breast.  “The orchard walls are high and hard to climb!”

 

And then came the angelic sound of his voice, “With love’s light wings did I o’er-perch these walls.  For stony limits cannot hold love out, and what love can do that dares love attempt!”

 

My heart again leapt into his and melted there within it as we spoke, Love solidly and all-knowingly taking the helm of our lives.  I then fortified my previous sentiments of love for him, letting him know that it was safe to pledge his own love for me.  And he did so.

 

He came forth with the most dulcet tones, “Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear that tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops…” but was interrupted by a strange sound.

 

I queried, “My love?” and watched, holding my breath, as he removed from his foremost pocket a small tinkling thing, glowing as the moon itself.

 

“My cell phone,” he lamented, eyes downcast.  “It didst take leave of me, the remembrance to shut it off.”

 

At that very instant, some little thing fell away from the moment, or perhaps I should say wilted, for it felt as a living thing that drew in breath sharply, but daintily, and somehow could not recover from an unidentified loss of the smallest proportions.  And I cannot say why to this day, ‘tis a mystery, as it was truly small, insignificant, really, not worth mentioning.  Small, as a silver-tipped leaf in a silver-tipped forest.

 

Fini

 

 

PHOTO CREDITS:

 

Verona balcony snagged from http://www.freefoto.com/images/14/14/14_14_82—Romeo-and-Juliet-Balcony–Verona-Italy_web.jpg

 

Sword from Getty Images

 

 

 

Missalister’s “Love waiting,” copyright © 2008, was spun off the Sunday Scribblings prompt “#132 – If I had to live at a different time in history.”  Click here for more on prompt #132 from other Sunday Scribblings participants