A Life Remembered

The reflection troubled him like he had never known before. He felt the solitude speak to him through the burgundy shadows of the portrait. The way the rotund face gleamed back at him with the wisdom of a thousand years, granulated throughout the years, aged in layers of delicate oils, resting comfortably amongst the delicate and ancient canvas reminded him of his dearly departed wife who had died only months before.

This was his first social engagement outside the lifespan of their marriage. The death of his beloved Sarah happened in June, and was the end to a 15-year relationship, the only significant relationship he had ever known. Yet here she was, present in this painting, at the unveiling of the Mirador collection at the Museum of Modern Inconveniences, rising coherently out of a nameless opera that swung madly from the aerial speakers above him, twisting his pinot noir buzz, hitting somewhere right in the middle of peaceful solitude and tangible melancholy.

When the music slowed to a dreary pace, the anticipation of another swell of power present in the tenors lungs that very day brought Nancy back for just a moment, a three dimensional level to the painting, a hologram of her, standing in the still shadows visible, tangible, acting as the stopgap for dimensions. He could look across to her, the archipelago of sound crept up to him, offering bountiful harvests of sound for which his ears could languish over, take time to digest the crescendos and recount the memories: the dishes broken in jest, the disappointment in her eyes after the miscarriage, until it raced into his heart, when he could feel it, could count the palpitations in his heart, hear it skip a beat down there, sink when the oboe did.

The full-bellied intoxicant of the wine had subsided, and the reed came in, delicately chortling its way into the bathroom, down to the bathtub, the soaring string section inviting his pores to scalding water, clearing out the oily pores and pent up aggression he felt for Nancy at the time of her demise. The stillness of air and smothering hot steam glided across his bathroom later on in the evening, after he polished off the bottle and it lay facing him on the floor, the bottle having bequeathed to him the gift of memory, lucid visions, and virtuous intentions. The coat of false security was so vivid, so touchable it could have come from the very month before she died, when he'd visit her in the mental hospital, after classes finished for the day.

How and why he watched her delicately fall from grace, become tattered by circumstance, left lonely to sing and slog out the heavy months, months where she could feel the delicate balance of freedom and incarceration. Months of deliberate medication, would follow, stretching out the afternoon through the agonizing passage of time called therapy, group explanations of psychosis, feeling the demons pulling people apart inside from their own charred perspectives. Long lost connections to reality were revealed to everyone. No luxuries of distraction, only pain intensified pain personified, long stares into white stucco paint. Instead of showing signs of recovery, she instead left her mind at a point in the center of the lake of her own madness. As if she had surpassed a point where she could no longer return. Once the window to that world was opened, she could never again return to lazy Sundays reading newspapers, or the giving of workshops in her home, demonstrations of floral arrangements. Never again could love her husband as she did before. She died paralyzed in a stoic pose, remembered for her struggles, her ability to fight when appropriate, and when to have the dignity to give up and let go of the string that held her sanity in check enough to permit visitors, enough to give her husband hope until he no longer believed there was any left.

It was all there, her life splayed out in rich luxurious colors, laid out on the canvas in the oval room, the entrance to the foyer from which she used to begin her evenings with a light cordial and later sleeping in as daffodils elegantly lined the driveway for the service. Where the stark light and darks resembled the outer shadows of the painting he still gazed at, still teary eyed, as the final swell of the opera gasped it's last breath.