Let me quote Yeats here:
"When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
How many loved your moments of glad grace
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
And loved the sorrows of your changing face."
As I travel out into my everyday world, the serious far off look on my face warns all who look upon me that some essential part of me is far removed. I have covered myself in silence and stillness; there is no compulsion within me to fill the emptiness with sound and gestures.
The wind blows at me, disrupting the subtle and silent, wordless thing that is all that is legft in the place where my heart beat such a short time ago...a lifetime removed. Iook away my eyes fixing on the approaching storm clouds. I watch unmoved as it unleashes its fury and batters against buildings howling inr age and I see my tears running in rivulets down cracks in buildings and pavements. The scream inside me is echoed in the violence I see outside. ...I walk within. I feel nothing so far removed from anything am I. I observe. Nothing touches me. I am ice.
The storm reflects my silent scream, that which now is the entire inside of me constantly, unceasingly. It deafens my spirit as it pounds against the seemless calm veneer that all see and all believe in; only I know how false the surface is.
Yet I have known a different world. Here everything is starkly true. Nothing is abstracted or softened by your presence in me, by your touch that made unbearable things light as air for me, Words only now grasp ideas and pale them into shadows, and I cannot chain the monsters that loom inside me and reign.
What ought to be
what should be
what isn't
I have the same feeling as someone who has been too long in a cool dark place watching a movie who suddenly emerges into the bright heat and sunshine and this emptiness leaps out time and again brutal, real, solid into sight and feeling, into being.
The world which was multidimensional ssuch a short time ago, pregnant with possibilities and hope, with joy and meaning deeply satisfactory and full of light....has suddenlt, painfully become merely flat and two dimensional. Aliveness in me fades, and I slide back into being safely dead. The smouldering_deep_inside_each_cell_awareness I push back deep down unworded buried beneath my obligations to the banal.
