Towers

“…The onus was always my own,

Your love was eternally forlorn…

…Now the sermons are too much to bear,

Not a word of love I could hear…”

Two tall towers build too quickly, too early… too fragile…

In the marshy November dawn, two tender hands played with sticks and stones… and made the towers stand erect with love and fidelity. You could tell it was a ceremony binding us together till eternity… you hoped… we hoped…

You stood there with me, admiring our creation and the alluring love that lied beyond. You played in those towers, ran around and mischievously whispered in my ears… “Darling”… you crawled up on my sternum and told you to climb down… surreptitiously hoping that you would climb back again…

I remember your tower had colours, games, and strawberries and sugar… whereas mine had guitars, pages, coffee beans and skull caps…. You would sketch on an empty canvas a picture of our love… a picturesque beauty of the oceans, flowers and rain with the faun enveloping us with his massive hand… protecting us and the towers till the end of eternity… a fable of two mystical enigmas…

Alas, after the love came the burning separation. The towers now stood apart, distant yet still looking over each other… we made the towers so the distance wouldn’t haunt us… to stay forever in each other’s embrace without the care of the world… against the care of the world… against the care of self…

We outmatched distance but we underestimated another opponent… “Time”… and together with distance it began to break the tethers that bound our towers to the ground… we were scared and dismantled… I told you to hold tight and listen… but you were too scared and too mournful… we fought and we argued…

When the towers would fall I knew it will hurt us both, even more it will wound you. I told you to leave the towers; climb down and exit. Forget about the towers but at least be safe… I could have built the towers again but never again can my godless hand forge your perfect existence…

I vividly recall drops of tears in your eyes; you thought I had lost faith in the towers… the stalwart symbol of our love… you thought I had lost faith in our love… you ran away, almost disappeared into a shiny beacon of light quickly fading into the nihil…

The towers fell, I along with them... in the wreckage laid the body of a lover, dead yet still alive… his heart still pumping blood through his lifeless body…

I woke up after that apocalypse… alone and desolate, only to find the ruins of the towers around me and a broken canvas from which the faun had forever gone... A picture of me standing alone in the ocean and the rain, drenched and destroyed, amidst the ruins of our towers… stuck behind the canvas was a letter which contained the above four lines…

I knew you had been mistaken, I would tear my heart out to bring you back… but to where? To these ruins? To this defiled puddle of rocks and twigs? For what our love stood for, itself had crumbled…

After love came the burning distance, after distance came the searing time, after time came the incinerating end. In the flames of that cremation, I burned all our memories to ashes… the sticks, the stones, the canvas, the strawberries and the coffee beans… After the fire came a deafening silence, so peaceful it was revitalizing… so serene it was rejuvenating…

As I departed I understood that our love doesn’t deserve what I hold for you now. I wish to remember us as that alluring panorama of two small kids holding hands, lovingly trying to construct two small towers, hoping for them to forever stay erect… as two lovers fighting against time and distance under the protective veil of the towers.

I have left a note for you beside the ashes, though not knowing whether you’ll ever return to me or to those ruins… I leave a bit of its extract here…

“… The onus wasn’t always your own,

My love you could have never known…

… Now the sermons they shall come to halt,

Love, a victim of time’s assault”