Your beauty is a form of suffering

A meditation on seasons

Words & images © Paul Ransom

Behold: beauty in the form of you. How could I fail to notice?

Yet, from your embrace I will surely be excluded; and there is nearly nothing I can do about it. No charm to make light of the fact, no language to rebrand the chasm. A thousand years ago when I was younger, bolder, less textured with bruise and scar, I would have dreamt, maybe acted. Not now. The flowers of spring are too sweet for the soil of autumn. The fall too heavy to fly in the light.

That there is a ground we share, a sky we both long for…songs we sing in harmony, feelings that sync…no matter. The odds will not be shortened; the space not closed. Instead, I will turn from you, a little more broken each time, and briefly, hopelessly pray to a billion gods I know aren’t there to disguise the irrefutable evidence of years. Which they will not. And I will love you in isolation, and teach myself not to want you too much.  

We can give it other names, conjure plausible sophistries, but we both know what it is. Between my cold bones and you there lies an ocean. It is the sea of circumstance. The scattering of hearts in time. The lottery of birth does not care for our denials, nor grant our wishes. It is neither fair nor unfair. It just is. Even if the temporal arrow is something we merely imagine, the decades remain an expanse. A puncture wound. Blood that will not be washed away.

I know, in fine detail, the manner in which I would cherish you. Adore you. Listen deeply. Let you breathe. Stand aside when required. Learn the world anew from you, and reinvent myself. Yet still it will not be. For you are starting what I am done with, and I cannot honestly walk the same path with you.

Though I would surely cave-in to the miracle of your asking, it would be a selfish acceptance. A hormone high. An unsustainable extravagance.

I may flatter myself with lofty determinations, but I know how gravity works – and even love obeys the second law. Pleasure to performance. Desire to obligation. Novelty to habit.

It is better you experience these trajectories as the risk of hoping, rather than as a dividend of the banal. As the cost of my feeding on you.

So, here I am; stranded in your midst. Nearness as a form of distance. Touch as a sign of being untouchable. From this vantage, I look across the valley of desire, and your beauty is the horizon. As I am drawn towards it, so it recedes.

What exquisite damnation it is to see so clearly, yet be confined to looking. I should tear my eyes away. Forget. Because your beauty is a form of suffering.

In my gut, it feels like falling. Exile.  

You are what I am no longer. You dwell in the house I have left behind. You rise as I decline. And so it goes; endless ways to reach the same point.

Your beauty reminds me of ashes. Shivering, I pine for a fire, knowing that the flame will not warm. Will burn instead for travellers other than I. In truth, these distances are a blink, yet they may as well be infinite.

This is the scale of a human life. Decades are aeons. Small gaps interstellar. It is both terrible and wonderful, a tyranny and a liberation. I suffer in the state of your beauty to throw off my chains. I ache just to feel, die to know what life is.

I turn away now, that I may behold you with deeper sensing. Allow your beauty to suffuse every cell, to render the suffering sublime.

If I cannot love you with presence, then I will do so with absence. From such a corner, unobtrusive, unnoticed, may this aching be as beautiful as you.