Certainly, rivers of ink have flowed about life and death, I myself have contributed with a drop or two to that flow of ideas that are diffused in papers that sooner or later end up folded in some drawer; and although anonymous ideas still feed that flow of thought.
Speaking of life and death, some time ago I already dedicated some ink to Miss Joyce, but not the one that everyone now adores without knowing it, not the one that fascinates whoever stumbles upon her image. No. I wrote those lines for that pale girl with an elusive look, that Miss Joyce who had to force her voice to be heard and who apologized for everything as if she were breathing.
The decade of the 1890s was ending and the impetus for change was running through the cobblestone streets on the backs of horses buffeting the steam of the machines that came after them. And just as a candle flame flickers, all certainties wavered before what time brought in its belly.
And even in such circumstances, I remember the first time I saw her. She was entangled in the curtain of her window, trying to look like a reflection in those cloudy glasses that barely let the light from the outside filter through. One second was enough to make a deep impression on me. Now that I think about it, maybe it was a strange need to help her or save her from her starving existence and the dreary rhythm of her life in that house, as strange as its inhabitants.
I tremble at the thought of Miss Joyce's eyes now craving to rest on mine, and although I always considered myself superior I know well that now no fate would save me from succumbing to the whirlpool of her deep eyes. I knew it was a matter of time, that she had plans for me all along. Plans that she drew from those doomed panes of her taciturn window as she watched me pass by in my solemn walk with my cane held behind my back.
Plans that were revealed when the letter I now read reached me, a letter of his impregnated with the aromas of forgotten centuries, of life and death again. Impregnated with the scent that makes Miss Joyce to blossom, and while I stagger as I try to continue reading I only hear the whip crackling over the horses' heads and the desperate herding of the coachman while at full speed the wagon engulfs this night road that providence put us as an escape route.
While my eyes try to fix on the elusive lines of that fateful missive, my mind in the background tries to find the phrases of that half-learned psalm. We become fervent believers in the face of danger. At last my eyes come to the last line dedicated to me by Miss Joyce and more than a phrase it seems like an oath, "Together forever".
I no longer hear the whip or the driver, I lean out of the window and who controls the car is someone else, in the darkness I think I recognize a once starving figure that looks at me with the depth of eyes darker than the night that protects us. The car slows down and takes the road back to the city. It takes the road to Miss Joyce. It take the road to the eternity.
This is an original story from @joalheal for The ink well community in their weekly prompt #59: Blossom.
photography from @zpnohad edited in Canva and Pisart.
Modeling @zpnohad
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
