Swen waited until her breathing had slowed to a deep lulling unconsciousness. He knew he had nothing left but he didn’t know how to tell her. He had tried, my God how he had tried, but something kept getting in the way. Some other emotion would swoop in and take over. Take them both away. On some mad swirling twisted tornado of feelings. She would cry and he would apologise. Eventually, yeh, but always, he smiled. She would forgive him. Immediately at times. When he told her he loved her so much it tore him up inside. She would look at him with the depth and need that he wanted to see so much. Even when she didn’t say so, he could see it in her eyes. It didn’t matter how long it took. If not immediately, then eventually. She would forgive him. Always.
He started to cry. Somewhere deep inside. His eyes welled up. But he couldn’t hear himself because he was lost to himself. He was lost and he had nothing left. He had lain there until she was asleep. Waiting until his darkness could reveal itself. Waiting for her to fall away into the deep. And then he rolled away. Heaving his great cold limb away, like a huge sodden tree trunk after a storm. Broken. Useless. Fallen. Heavy. Dead. Cold. His limb. Her limbs. She fell away and into him, through the hours of darkness, her warm breath rising and falling against his bones, in the stillness of the moon.
He told himself to go to sleep but he could not stop. History was now. How could they have forgotten the simple things so easily? He worried about his wife; he worried about his children; he worried about now. They thought they were invincible. He knew they were vulnerable. But he was growing old. So old. He was haunted by his own youthful invincibility; by his dead heroes; by his reckless valor; by his stupid mistakes; by his secret vanity; by his submerged fears. His horror of his past; and his visions for his future. He felt that no-one could see what he saw. He was unknown even to himself. How could he teach them? She knew every inch of his sullen limbed and lifeless body, but she never knew what he was thinking. His mind was a furnace, his face reflected a moon, his limbs were cold and dead. His brain raced away like a steam train through the shivering mists and lamenting thickets. Onward to infinity. But she was a thousand miles away. Sleeping silently beside him in the darkness.
He looked out into the vast black distance that opened up before him and he saw his own torment. He saw that he was inside and outside of himself. He was a torn and knotted sheet, a reflection passing in a window, a half-remembered word. He was inside and outside of himself. He wanted to be at one with the Gods; with all their spiritual gifts; their abundance of luck; their natural justice; their plurality and unity; in the light of their judgement; under their truth; within their beautiful ideas; their faith and their holy dreams; their innocence, honesty, peace, compassion and love; he wanted to be remembered by his children; and his children’s children; to be in their memories; in their words of kindness; and live within the law. But he owed his body to the Kings, with their pious gold and envied jewels; their armies and their weapons; their jealousy and their greed; their prisons and their lust for power; their taxes and their contractual bonds; their slaves and their brutal battles for survival; their murder and their deceit. He hated himself for it but with every day that passed with him in their service, he was helping them to drill into the molten core of the earth; to unleash its nuclear forces; upon a tender world; that screamed in pain and terror. The Kings alone - imperious, victorious, merciless - screamed louder than the hell, that surrendered its soul, unto their ears, in the flickering flames of the night.
Now he could make out the faint ghost of the ceiling three meters above his nose. He disliked the wallpaper that he could not see but knew was around him, and he sighed. His forehead began to twist in and upon itself. He rolled his trunk further away from her, in the twisted sheets, but unconsciously her hand fell out to touch his back instinctively. He reminded himself that he would always be an animal of the material world. He knew he was - because he had always given in to her, in the end - well didn’t he? His emotions were numb, but his blood kept returning to his brain, again and again, like the fire that drove the burning engines, that kept on pounding their fists into the sodden ground. His heart kept pumping through the night, on to the infinity, without him thinking. His spirit could not will his blood to stop churning, but it had tried, how it had tried. He knew it would keep pumping even if he tried to cut his entangled life away from his fallen broken body; his heart would keep pumping, until all the life was drained from him, out into the infinity. He knew he could not stop that at all. To the infinity: the place where the Gods are always hiding; just out of reach; always just beyond the horizon; the train of his life, always on an uphill track, to some silent destination beyond the moon; where she was now, is now, and will always be. A thousand miles away.
(A few years after the second World war existentialist philosophers in Europe were grappling with the meaning of their lives. The industrial revolution, that had signaled the end of the old Feudalist systems of production had led to a World so full of nuclear weapons it could destroy itself 10 times over. Europe was divided between the totalitarian institutions of communism in the East and the laissez-faire inequalities of capitalism in the West; socialists in the West were struggling to find a 'third way' between the humanism of the Utopian Socialists (e.g. the 'Fabians') and the materialism of the Marxists. 'Swen' is struggling with the exigencies of living in that epoch. His feelings resonate with a post-Industrial, post-Soviet, post-Modern World; the same old political and economic dialectics, re-inventing themselves today in the battle between the Nation State and the Globalised Markets.
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