To tell the truth it was not as burdensome as before. Now it was simply life as it had been for the past fifteen years. One had to remind oneself the present is different from what had once been. The continuous demands of existence are amplified with age, becoming more and more overwhelming while strength slips away with each fruitless effort. Decay, when gradual, is nearly imperceptible to the unconcerned eye. It is subtle, sapping vigor in small doses, until day by day there come unsuspected epiphanies- you cannot open the jam jar on your own. You cannot lift the pot onto the stove on your own. You cannot climb the stairs without a pause, then two or three, haltingly.

So far however, she had stayed out of the nursing homes, which she considered her greatest success. There was nothing worse, in her opinion, than dying on display. She hid herself away -  everything she needed to survive was brought to her doorstep, in a box she could leave outside to be taken away again. It was an exchange with which she was familiar- receiving, and returning nothing.
Words like monocyte inflammation, oxytocin, and cortisol meant nothing to her. There is a point where scientific analysis of fatality must end, to make room for the deliberate actions of the heart - one cannot pump affection through IV.
She did know, however, that even the most wonderful things, when experienced alone, cannot be appreciated at the zenith of their beauty.

In the evenings she would sit, for hours on end with her thin, knobbly fingers curled around each other on her lap, possessed by an inexplicable feeling of incompleteness. It was extraordinary to think that she had loved so much in the same place she was now, and that so many years had gone by without any break in the mundane.

Man, she believed,  must always return to the intangible beauty of the heavens, a shadow of which is present in the beauty of music, art, literature. But what use was there in reading Dante and Aeschylus, listening to the Brandenburgs and the Messiah, and surveying Monet and Matisse on her walls if there was nobody with whom she could discuss them?

Moreover, it was profoundly painful, being forgotten. The most ardently revered deities, the greatest ancient war heroes, and the sturdiest structures eventually crumble. It was as natural as dying. Yet to her, every breath was tinged with a desperate feeling of futility. All the promises ever made dissolved into dust, succumbing to the brevity of life. Her fists clenched over scattered memories, her mind lingering over the tint of her husband’s reddish-gold hair in the sun, his shirt-front untucked in the morning stillness.

When she was eleven, growing up in Lille, she had been taken aside in school and beaten by the headmistress for giving her lunch to a beggar boy. Stiff and bruised, she headed back home to her father, her hand clenched over the purple imprint of the ruler blooming on her small palm.
Her father was waiting in his study, obscured by piles of books and papers. He looked up when she arrived, his brow furrowing when he saw her arms folded behind her back, her eyes rimmed with pink.

Qu’ est ce que tu as? He asked, slowly, softly.

She heaved a small sigh, drawing from behind her her scarlet-striped hand. With a large breath she spilled the story, leaving out no small detail, speaking of the boy’s cracked frostbitten nails and the headmistress’s indifferent pursed lips.
There was no self-pride in her account. She did not see herself as a martyr for any cause, but an achiever of a simple act of human kindness.

Her father said nothing. His head began to tilt downwards, his glasses gradually slipping down his nose, spurred by an invisible liquid leaking out from beneath his eyes.
At last he held out his arms. She crawled into his jacket, embracing her father. It was an embrace that transcends age and time, one you can revisit in certain recesses of memory and still feel the aching pressure of tenderness.
When he finally spoke he said, caressing her bruised hand, “Fyodor Dostoevsky, the most admirable author in all of Russia, once said that, ‘Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men...must have great sadness on earth.’”
He kissed her on the forehead. “It is an almighty paradox.”

And was it not sadness that she felt now? She woke up with it, she dressed in it, she consumed it, she slept with it, she created it. And she was far from great. Was it all a mere symptom of selfishness?
In her misery she had worn a hole in her knitted maroon nightgown. She slipped her index finger in the opening and lifted up the cloth to let it poke through to the other side, wearing the hole larger and larger. This continued, until she noticed an unusual speck in the distance outside the window.

A small figure was headed up her driveway, up the cobbled walkway and onto the porch, taking small deliberate steps, as if treading on sacred ground. It was a young girl, whose arms held a mass of papers, drawn tightly to her chest. At a closer glance, it seemed like every letter the old woman had received since three months prior. Nobody she knew or cared for was still alive, so the child’s arms were filled with magazines, coupons, notices and documents of the sort. The girl was the only person, out of the hundreds who passed her bursting letterbox every day for the past half a year, who had bothered to knock on her door of their own volition.

Three soft knocks against the glossed wooden door echoed loudly in the emptiness of the house. With each hit, it felt as if a beat was was being struck into its heart.

She was startled by the knocks, although she had watched every step of the young girl’s progress from the mailbox to the door. Part of her did not believe she would ever see Youth under her roof ever again. And part of her did not want to. She was afraid she would not recognize herself in the fragile form, the awkward limbs propelled forward with energy and earnest.

Nonetheless she smoothed her nightgown down hastily and pulled strays ends of her hair behind her ears, making her way unsteadily towards the arched door frame. Behind it, staring with wide eyes, was a thin girl of about eleven years old, with her arms clasped almost protectively around the bundle of letters. She had the look of somebody who had just made up their mind to do something daring, but, when faced with the task, had lost all courage and nerve.

The girl’s name was June. She often walked past the house in the evenings, coming home from school. She admired the peculiarity of its washed out yellow color, the ivy that wrapped itself around the columns like a serpent, and the careless growth of the flowerbeds. She did not know what compelled her to empty the mailbox and bring it up to the front door other than curiosity, and so there she was, standing still and dwarfed by the enormity of the drawing room.
 
“Thank you.” The old woman received the letters with hesitation, placing them one by one on the tabletop.

June shifted her feet, pulling at her fingers behind her back, unsure of whether or not she should stay. Despite her attempts at fixing her eyes on the floor, she was drawn to the commanding elegance of the room, the Victorian-era oil paintings and heavy hand-woven tapestries, watercolor vases and polished marble countertops, dome-shaped doorways with calligraphic carvings.. If what one owned told a great deal about who one was, then the woman’s mind was as contrasting and disorderly as her furnishings; a disparate world’s worth of experience encapsulated in three hundred meters squared.
 
The old woman stopped abruptly as she placed the last magazine on the table. She seemed unable to respond normally, as if she were half-blind to human interaction, like miners who had been trapped underneath the earth for so long that their eyes had to be shielded from the light of day.
The magazine slipped off the table, and the old woman reached for it, stretching her arthritic fingers out to the ground, but could not grasp it. June bent down, and lifted it gently off the floor, examining the front cover.

“It’s a crossword.”

The old woman look confused. She had never seen one before. Multiple empty boxes resembling geometric snakes were connected across the paper, with numbered questions listed beneath.

“Here,” June, determined once again, set it on it table, “I’ll show you.”

She pulled a worn bit of pencil out of her dress pocket, and smoothed the front cover of the magazine down on the table. Tentatively, she edged the magazine closer to the old woman.

“What you have to do is read the definition, and guess the word. There are numbers that have vertical definitions and horizontal definitions. See?”

But the old woman remained silent and confused. She did not know how to respond to such vivacity, such attention focused on her after so many years in isolation. She sat still. She wished firmly that June would leave so she could return to the discomfort she was used to, but the girl was adamant and would not leave until she had broken through.

“Sometimes they have themes. The theme of this one is ‘Sights around the World.’ Number one vertical asks, ‘What is the oldest structure in Greece?’” June paused for a moment. “I’m not sure.”

“The Parthenon.” The old woman replied. “The acropolis of Athens.”

June looked up at her, but the old woman was looking directly ahead. She looked back down at the paper and counted the spaces. There were nine spaces, one for each letter of the word. “You’re right,” she indicated the neat letters lined up inside the adjacent boxes. “Let’s try another one. ‘What is the name of the blue city of Morocco?’” 

“Chefchaouen.”

This time June did not fill in the spaces. She handed the pencil to the old woman and moved the magazine closer to her. The old woman leaned in, and wrote the letters in the infinitesimal boxes slowly and deliberately. “I used to live there. In Chefchaouen. With my husband.”  The words came out slowly, as if from a dripping tap.

June put her hands behind her back again. “Is it really all blue?”

“It really is. The deepest blue, as if the sky had been poured onto the houses.”
The old woman’s watery gray eyes quavered in their sockets, reflecting the evening rays trickling in between the lace curtains.

Throughout the following days and weeks, June would visit regularly and spontaneously. Her small pair of white shoes at the door was now a fresh memory. It was not covered by a film of longing, but of expectation and anticipation. The old woman had discarded her moth-eaten maroon nightgown, setting it out in a box outside to be taken away. The first reminder of her past life that she relinquished.

Now she would sit at the porch, hastily combing her thinning grey hair back when she saw June approaching, smoothing out her faded dress. Her visits were not particularly long, sometimes she could stay but for a minute or two - cycling back from school with her hands spread out at her sides, pedaling with reckless abandon- but it was always enough. She would bring small gifts from time to time - flowers, trinkets, seashells. Once she brought red hair clips and pinned up the old woman’s hair, her clumsy childish fingers struggling with the clasps.

There had been no miraculous transformation in the old woman, whose name she admitted to June was Celine. There was a sincerity and certainty that came with this kind of guileless affection, that had cracked open the wellspring of fragility and tenderness  that she had always harbored in her heart. It had been hardened by years of isolation, but at the slightest prompting it had burst forth again. She had known love, she had watched it wake up in front of her, stand next to her, hold her in the afternoon, embrace her, and depart from her. It had been enough, indeed more than most. Her memories were most precious to her - they were a small fragment of eternity inside a dying brain.

Celine reveled in the seemingly inconsequential moments, specks of dust on the mantelpiece of time, when June would peer in, unkempt and disheveled with the passion of youth. They would sit down opposite each other at the table in the Moroccan room, drinking mint tea in the sweltering heat of summer and exchanging stories from each other’s lives. June speaking always of the present, Celine of the past.
Her past experiences remained like stubborn bedsheet creases she couldn’t iron away, rebounding at her attempts to smooth them into oblivion. Yet, by passing on these memories from her life she felt as if she were preserving them from the ruins of absurdity, and although this was impossible, it was enough.

She had spent her youth at a time very different from the present, in an era June could only grasp from textbooks and over dramatic documentaries. Her early life had taken on the metallic tinge of war - both its memory and its anticipation.

“What do you regret the most?” June had asked her one afternoon, abruptly, her chin resting on her palm in a preoccupied manner. It had been a long morning, and schoolwork and the company of her peers had begun to wear on June. It is at times like these that one is eager to hear of anybody’s life but one’s own, to escape the reality of the present moment by diving into someone else’s memories.
Celine looked at her, aware of June’s eyes roving over the ridges and indents in her aged face and stooped form. Her child-like stare was not one of condescension, but awe.

The old woman stood still for a long time. But in her silence she was not grappling for an answer, for she knew and had always known it. She was simply coming to terms with the fact that her deepest regret would eventually be the little girl’s as well, for although men build resilient statues that last the ages they do not hold themselves back from tearing each other down.
Celine leaned forward, letting her filmy grey eyes cloud and fill with the invisible liquid. Her native tongue flooded forth, the French bringing with it the memory first bomb and the first sight of blood, the cries of small children like visions in a fog-

“Je n’ai jamais connue la paix mondiale…

I have never known world peace.”

And after a pause her mouth cracked into that peculiar smile, her remaining teeth poking out while missing members resembled gaping holes, like the poorly cut-out eyes of a bedsheet ghost.

Sometimes June reminded Celine of her husband, in her tenacity and innocence, in her disregard for the opinions of others. She saw his shadow as June wheeled in on her bike, and when she dismounted from it it was not her that Celine saw but him, one-legged, his helmet too big for his head and slipping down around his ears.

She had met him when she was working as a nurse during World War II.

“He was a young doctor. He was partially paralyzed in one leg so they let him stay. Yet, with a little help, he built this whole house.”  She swept her hands up, letting them fall down again, gently at her sides.

In the night he would wake up at odd hours to finish some abandoned area of construction, spontaneously painting the door purple or screwing on a chandelier. He would make his way back up the stairs to the bedroom when he was done, unaware that she was still awake to smell the latex and acrylics clinging to him, to hear his uneven steps padding the carpet floor.

“He went into Medicine to find a cure for his brother’s brain cancer. I could only admire him working, working, working. That is love. I never knew it could hold such depth before then.”

And now she knew it so well.

When June left that day, the old woman felt such a wrenching, such a tightening in her chest. This pain was love and it was the pain of love. Everything she preserved reminded her of it and how intensely she had cared. She was overcome with tears. Must the greatest love always be exchanged for the greatest sorrow? The enormity of it pressed down upon her soul, which had been hollowed out and filled, hollowed out and filled.. 

The quiet moments she had shared with June, although brief and occurring at the twilight of her life, were emblematic of an immortal truth. You cannot, she decided, really separate temporal, finite beauty from everlasting and infinite beauty, because beauty that remains forever is revealed through temporary beauty. It is a shadow of the everlasting.

The pain continued to spread, but as it flooded forth from her heart it was no longer pain, but warmth and lightness. She could no longer feel her limbs, she was only aware of the clarity of her thoughts. Her life was spread before her, being slowly elevated like darkroom prints from their submersion, the tints and tones of her trials and joys deepening- she had been colored with love and loss, and was at last ready to fade out.

June parked her bike at the mailbox, running up the steps, clasping a motley bouquet of wildflowers. It was evening time, and the chimes tinkled as they swayed in the breeze. She knocked on the door, but there was nobody to greet her.
Acoustic arab music was playing very low, and it enveloped her as she slipped in and out of rooms in an effort to find the old woman. She wandered among piles of books and relics glazed with dust until she found her, her face immobile, eyes closed in an expression of calm familiarity.

At her bedside table, was an open volume of Gerard Manley Hopkins’. The thick leather string held the page open-
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And few lilies below

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea

It was late evening, and the house sighed and seemed to heave its chest as the echo of the flute and lyre faded again into the distance. She had been given what she wanted - to arrive and depart with nothing.