Bookends

The good, the bad, but definitely not the ugly, … the tale of two of the Dianas in my life.

The first may well have been a goddess, she told me so when first we met and I believed her; I still do. Joy erupted around her so that I could sense when, garbed in culottes, she’d approach my barracks unannounced, sure I’d be there, and everyone around me sensing it as well; her charisma so strong everything else immediately faded to non-significance. The remembrances are almost as strong. Every few years, when she enters my dreams, I awake as enamored as I’ve ever been, and sometimes, perhaps foolishly, I do something to remind her of the days when “when” was when.

The last, somehow beautiful although I’m not sure how, her parts didn’t really add up. She seemed so much more than she was in every possible respect although I suspect she could have been everything I imagined. But could have been, almost, was all she ever attained, more’s the pity, although, had it been different, parting might have been much worse. She was as unhealthy for me as the first Diana was beneficent. Every few years, when she enters my dreams, I awake as enamored as I’ve ever been, then I shudder, grateful that what might have been never was.

The last Diana, as demonic as the first was deistic, both seemingly everlasting, haunting my dreams and my memories. The first opened me up to impossibly integral love, fantasies, idealism, impossible dreams and the last quashed them and closed me, changed me, turned me from the personal and sublime to the practical and desperate, rechanneled my energies outward, perhaps not all that bad, except that so much feeling is gone, so much tenderness, so much color and aroma and taste, as though I’d turned one dimensional.

On and off switches. I wonder what I’d have been like without them. I wonder what I’d be like if in another existence things had been different.

I’m a bit frightened of Dianas now.

What could a third one be like?
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2016; all rights reserved