Lenora

CW: This story is (as will become obvious) not autobiographical, but it is however written as an outlet for the author's experiences, as a way to make sense of and healthily internalize them. It touches various subjects of mental health including depression, loneliness and suicide ideation and so a trigger warning is merited. I hope you find some worth in it.

The sea was colored by the setting sun's red rays and the seagulls sang a lonesome song. It was almost as if they knew where the old man was going, or maybe this was merely the first time he paid attention. How many sunsets had he let pass by, and how for how many sun rises was he thankless and indifferent? Life had a cruel habit of letting its graces and gifts be known only the instant before they were to be violently seized, and whose beauty came to be seen only when it was destined to slip away.

"It looks grey." Her voice called from his right, and he looked. A slight smile drawn on her usually somber face.

"Just like the rest of this town," She stood up and stretched her back, in the flower of youth, with the idealism of young age strong in her voice. "One day I'm leaving this place, and I want you to come with me."

Those words stuck out through the fog of time elapsed to his old age; of course, she wasn't there now, no one was. He had never left this seaside, where once she said those words, nor lost sight of its grey waves that ceaselessly washed against the sharp rocks below the cliff. Friends came, went or died; love blazed with her furious flames and withered to embers again, jobs gained and lost, battles waged and won, triumphs felt and disgraces suffered, all washed in the waves he spent his youth trying to escape.

“And where would you go?” He asked her all those years ago, years that felt at the same instance a moment and eternity away.

“I don’t know,” She said, and sat down next to him, laying her head on his shoulder, “just so long as it isn’t here. This place isn’t meant for us.” Her delicate hands traced a pattern on his and she looked up at him, her soft and quiet beauty still remembered in his old age, “I want to be in a grand old city, with street lights and hustle and bustle, and so many people you could drown in them, doesn’t that sound grand?” Light blue eyes of entreaty and naive happiness shone and beamed at him, and he could only smile at her.

“I hate to say it, but I think of it too, I can’t imagine having to wake up to the same seaside wind, and the droning of the same swishing waves decades on end, there has to be more.” And with this confession of unity of opinion she beamed, burying her face in his chest in a tight embrace, the marks of which he bore to this day, “I don’t want this to change though,” and her hands felt the beat of his heart “I will never mind waking up hearing this every day. Here, there, just so long as this stays the same.” And her beauty radiated with a soft light

And to this day, his heart beat for her, though the only hand that felt it was his own. Now only the wind was the answer to his sighing, and the waves the only companions to fill his longing. As he walked along the cliffs sharp rocks he wondered whether a tumble would be easy, whether it would, in a few moments, provide the answer to his ceaseless search, for one cannot suffer if one does not want, and cannot want if they simply are not. His mind took him to brighter days, when the sea was yet undulled by the passage of countless years, and the birds sang a happy song in a forest that was a deeper shade of green than the one to which his feet solemnly dragged him. The path was beaten, familiar, walked a thousand times and more, to the point he could find his way even when his mind lost itself in reflection. How could he forget? Forget the location of so happy a place, a place his youthful stride carried him to to meet the keeper of his tender heart?

A sweet melody welcomed him from behind a tree that stood in the centre of a grove. Her hands squeezed the grass around her, her feet shifted uneasily, her anticipation scarcely contained in her small and delicate frame the instant before she caught his presence. A soft smile of blissful resignation came over her when she saw him, and she sunk into his embrace.

“I didn’t think you’d come today.” Her voice was muffled in his chest. “I’ve missed you.” If only she knew how much he would miss her.

In reply he said nothing, none needed to be spoken, to try to give words or corporeal form, to reduce the feeling he had in his soul to sounds and vibration seemed sacrilege, vulgarization, bastardization of the pure. Neither did she need words in reply, her cheeks pressed against his chest felt the depth of his love, and the softness of his touch spoke more than a thousand words of the tenderness with which he regarded her.

“You know when I was little,” He started a while after they sat down, “my dad came home one day and said he’d be off to the city awhile, and he could bring me a gift, something we couldn’t find in the old town.” She giggled, and listened all the more eagerly.

“I waddled to him and didn’t have to think twice about what I wanted, ‘A boat a boat!’ I hopped up and down. Stories were read to me at night, of brave explorers who braved the seas, who left the Old World for the new. Already I looked out and wanted to see past the blue’s inescapable expanse. ‘A boat, a boat!’ I must have woken up the whole town and poor old Margaret next door.”

She laughed with the warmth of a hundred hearths. “You were just adorable, you lost that a bit.” pinches his cheek, “You’re so serious now, and proper. Sweet once in a blue moon.”

“Now behave.” He pulled her hand away. “My paw paw looked down at me, and took me up, propped me on his lap, ‘Well I couldn’t get you a whole boat son, we haven’t the money. Even if we did, where would it go?’ I cried and raised a tempest the whole day long and to his question of where it would go I said only one thing, ‘The sea.’.”

“I would’ve gotten you a boat.” She cupped his calloused hand, “The whole world before I’d break your little heart. Wicked of your father!”

“Well off to the city he went and when he came back there I sat, arms crossed and still, and he produced from his bag a model boat. The loveliest piece of craftsmanship I ever saw, it read ‘Santa Maria’ on its base. Looking back it must have cost a fortune. I took it, sullen, little consoled with this gift whose worth I’d come to know only with wisdom. My dad took my hands in his, looked me in the eye and made his solemn vow. ‘One day, you’ll get a boat, a real one, and you will put it to the sea.’ And I cried and hugged him tight.” A loud and pregnant silence followed, he lost his words, and her tender gaze was fixed on him. He shook, both then as now, and tears came out his eyes in his youth and in the present, all in the same grove, only now no tender touch dried them. With every denial of her entreaties to leave everything they knew behind, her heart withered. Though she forced herself to stay, he could see the marks of a spirit in anguish, though forced her and himself to ignore them. As days passed into months and winter passed to spring, the trees never assumed the same green again.

He caught her looking too long towards the horizon one day, caught her eye glistening in the light of a dying star. “I can’t stay here anymore.” She whispered, as if it were a promise.

“Nonsense. I want to go as bad as you but what do you think there is over there? There’s nothing for us.” Perhaps he said it too harshly, he dashed her hopes too callously. This answer, and all the minute ways it could have been changed to avoid the inevitable would play in his memory for the rest of his days.

“I want to be out there with you… please. I thought you promised.”

“The world out there, we are not made for that. It’s time to grow up alright? It’s not in the cards for us, why can’t you see that?” He stamped about. He grew tired of this conversation corrupting their every meeting, and impatient with the sorrow whose depth he refused to acknowledge for the fear it would consume him too. She stayed silent; her heart had beat against her chest before, with a fierceness and fire for life beyond… but hearts grew tired from being denied and each passing day its beating became more faint.

“I’d have given you a boat.” Came her final promise, and her final tear. He left, indignant, without saying goodbye.

He remembered the frantic search of the next day, how his feet bled from running, how he barged into every door shouting her name “Lenora!” And found nothing but bewildered faces and empty expanse. She had crossed the sea. Lenora Lenora, he thought to himself now, why did you cross the forever blue sea? Why wasn’t my love enough? Do you still hear me? Does your heart beat to mine like it did all those years ago? Does the wind carry my sighing and the confessions of a broken spirit? Curse cowardice! Curse the fear of failure! Cursed be that which fools men into thinking the pain of failure holds a candle to the pain of everlasting regret! Lenora, Lenora, her name haunted his every dream and his every thought, her face in its youth was ever before his mind’s eye. Lenora Lenora, was his eternal prayer, his joy and his curse. Lenora, Lenora, whom he had let wither away.

He waited, both then and now, every morning by the sea, praying that he may see her return. Is the big world treating you well my Lenora? My weeping angel, my spring and winter? But now his hands trembled, his breath grew faint, how many more mornings could he wait? How much longer would he waste away waiting for something which, like everything else, would never come?

He stood up from under the dead tree, with wobbling knees and a wheeze. He walked, as fast as his tired legs could carry him to the beach, his heart bursting against his chest and knees cracking under the weight of his labor.

“LENORA!” He shouted once more, and for the last time. The sea was coming on a high tide, and the first streaks of dawn slithered their way into the blackness of night. A wave crashed against him, he had been too eager he thought, the sea could not be overcome, who was an old man against the might of the deep? Who was he against the force of terror, the watery prison that imprisoned him from his youth, the vast horizon that beguiled him with the promises of what lay beyond and denied him by its unfathomable depths and expanse? What is man to fate? As these questions raced in his head, a single answer came, solemnly given, with a resolve and strength that, like a star, burned with all the more brilliance for having been obscured for so many long years under the shadow of anguish; a man. And he stepped forward, against every inclination of cowardice, every rebellion of his body that flinched with fear, that ached for nothing more than to stay in stagnant comfort, every step was a war fought in the battlefield of his soul, himself against himself.

A man, the answer came to him again and again, the firm resolution of one committed to never again being condemned to servitude once feeling freedom’s embrace. The sea became more terrible with every foot he traversed, and as his feet lost the sand his arms had to paddle him against Leviathan’s mighty thrash. “One day you will have a boat and put it to sea.” His father had vowed a vow unfulfilled, but now it took the power of prophecy. He heaved and heaved and trudged through water which carried the weight of brick. Stop! Stop! Something within him begged, but what good was listening to the same voice whose counsel lost him the love of his youth? What did the sage-like counsel of wisdom and safety buy him but a graveyard of broken hearts and dreams? The sun rose higher, radiating its splendid light in the coming of a new dawn, as if in tribute to a hero's mighty ascent.

His chest convulsed as if a knife plunged itself into his heart. The pain nearly stopped him in his tracks, and a wave thrashed him in its unassailable current to sandy depths, before lifting him for one of his last gasps of air. Forward, forward, forward, forward, again and again and again against the anguished cry of every bone of his body, the pain that pierced deep into his frail form.

What was he to the great sea? A man. And in his final moments, as his breath became shallow, as his arms and legs slowed, and his body’s flame flickered though his soul blazed, he knew that he fought, and that was all man could do.

As the sun rose ever higher, his body proved too weak a vessel to stand the furious fire that burned within him, and as darkness began overcoming him, though day conquered night above him, his voice pronounced with the agony of eons of longing, the name that haunted his heart.

“Lenora.”