There was no paradise that buoyed hope up or dispersed despair in the old town that the woman dwelled. Her daily routine included a trip to the well, where she saw her own shadow when she peered into the well. She always did this before she drew water, or blood, from it.
The tepid heat brought along with it a placid torpidity that settled dreamily on the almost hollowed out streets since the children of the soil moved out, in search of golden promises that enticed even the most homebound and stability-seeking souls. The desire to journey into the new lands could not be bridled by the pleading cries of the ancient presence that guarded the old universe that had shrunken in stature and psyche.
The woman never married, so her children never left her. In the twilight of her consciousness, she remembered the lover who left under the lighted pallor of the solitary moon. No letters of explanation or notes of resentment. And there were no raving quarrels or disturbing silences that told of acrimonious undercurrents or spoke of a love that was submerging into a formless ocean that housed forlorn tales of shipwrecked passions that broke a thousand hearts.
The fading flame from the oil lamp was dimming the memories of love and loss that she hoped would somehow remain distinct despite an inscape that had been emotionally razed to the sinking ground that could bear it up no longer.
Anyone who has known love and lost it knows the heart-wrenching moments that assail whatever is left in the broken bottle of life that floats aimlessly in the night sea. The unfinished books, the torn photographs and the unwritten verses are all vestiges of a bruised being that stands naked in the wind-battered nothingness embracing her throbbing pain and pang.
She languished in the surrounding dreariness that cuts off any harbinger that presaged a change in the seasons. Night and Day no longer marked the passing of time, for time had died when her heart died the day he left her. The cracks on the walls which were raddled with age resembled ageless writing that carefully carved her desolation in an endless non sequitur.
The old town is falling asleep, in the midst of soulful sunset melodies reverberating through the sand-blown shadows of dusk. The woman no longer draws water from the well. The roses that lie on the floor are last season's blooms. No one picks them up anymore, no matter how beautiful they once were. Maybe one day the lover might return, but the woman would have disappeared into the night as she continues to whisper prayers for him among the stars and her own quiet solitude above that little old town.
