It hadn’t hit him yet. The character in the book he had stolen from the library, a Hemingway failure by all standards, didn’t know she, his young love, was already gone, though still she stood before him, eyes rearing up big diamond sutra tears. She knew. She knew long ago. And our reader supposes Hemingway’s main character, the dying Colonel, knew it as well, somewhere deep, within the hidden delves of self unseen, through flashes she would exhibit, that she would never touch him again, never laugh nor pout, never eat and drink with him nor, more devastatingly, peer into his own shallow eyes with her own deep pools of brown sunshine. Those orbs of lustrous beauty, universes unto themselves, would lose all their shine for him and slowly, oh so achingly slow, turn away and in seeing other things without him by her side, without him to validate what she saw was true and good, would slowly turn his life here into a kind of death, though one that would never make his heart stop functioning. For that was all he was thenceforth: a function. No love, no purity, no wealth of life, not even a man, merely a function.
This our reader could sense from merely perusing the shell of what Hemingway’s prior novel had taught him about loving and losing. It came as no surprise that our reader could read no further and, in dropping those yellowed and borrowed pages reflective as a mirror, nor could our reader feel what once lived within his own heart, what for a butterfly’s few fluttering winged moments had encompassed our reader in complete ecstasy, what had made him feel that, despite all the wrong choices up till now, they had come to a certain fruition of faith, that despite all the fuck-ups and squandered opportunities there had been something whole and true there for a while, if only for one of the ever fleeting moments in which one knows epiphany.
He turned to the window and the darkening sky beyond seeing nothing but the wind. A whole and simultaneously empty wind that blew through him as if he were now nothing more than the flimsy screen which attempted to keep the bees out.
I am a documentary and portrait photographer, specializing in a raw approach to shooting everything under the sun. Though I travel abroad often, I am currently based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and am available for assignments throughout North America and beyond.
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