A Lovestory (Part II)

“But I thought you said they were looking for love,” the observer said, watching the tableau before him.

The young woman regretted her decision, the observer noted. She slunk from the house, clutching a coat to her, sneaking out the front door. She took great gasps of the night air when she reached the outside, attempting without success to stop the tears from falling in rivulets of regret down her cheeks.

The young man still slept, oblivious to the woman’s desertion of him.

“They are,” the other said, also seeing the tableau. “But I AM love.”

“But sir,” the observer said, “I thought they loved nachos and pizza and kittens. All those things. What do they have to do with you?”

“Well, the good things I created, though I did not make that glop they call nacho cheese. It’s not even dairy! They did that on their own. But they misunderstand love. They think it is a feeling. It is not.”

“Did she find it?” the observer asked, gesturing to the young woman who was already talking on her cell phone to another young man, hoping he might give her a ride.

“No,” the other said. “Of course not, though she has bound herself to someone now. Breaking those bonds will hurt, but they must be broken. For they were never meant to be bound.”

“Bound?” the observer asked. “She looks free to me.”

“Not physically,” the other said. “But whenever they think they love something or someone, they bind themselves to it in their souls. Their emotions and their thoughts center on that thing, and they think for a time that this will make them happy, but it is only a temporary feeling of lightness, unable to be sustained for long.”

“Could they not add you to the mix?” the observer asked. “Would that not make them happy?”

“No!” the other glowered at the observer, “Why should I have to share them? I made them! They cannot have both that,” and he gestured to the young man drinking his sixth glass of scotch, his steps already wobbly and his eyes already glazed, “and me!”

Though the ferocity of the other’s voice almost made him afraid to ask the question, he knew that the other understood the righteousness in his heart and his true desire to know to do right, so he said timidly, “But why?”

“No one can serve two masters,” the other said, his voice less fierce as he explained to his observer, “when they love someone or something, they bind themselves to it in hopes that it will make them whole and complete, but only I can do that. I REFUSE to be bound to some of those things they become one with. That is not of me, not worthy of me.”

“But then how will they ever become complete?”

“They will have to break the bonds they made with the world. This is why they must die, and the pain is at times excruciating, but those who know that I am on the other side of this do it willingly, for being one with me is worth everything.”

The observer took his eyes off of the tableau before him for but a moment, daring a glance at the other. How arrogant he sounded! But with one look, the observer knew he was right. The other was worth everything.

“How do they not see that?” the observer wondered aloud.

The other glanced at the observer as well, a small smile on his face. The observer studiously avoided meeting eyes with the other. He had forgotten the other was omniscient and knew his thoughts.

“They are blinded,” the other said, “unable to see me as you have just done. It takes a long time before they have eyes to see, and the process of creating eyes in them is long and difficult. Few are willing to undertake that process.”

The observer looked again at the young girl, who was shakily holding a cigarette to her mouth and tapping her foot impatiently as she waited for the person who would give her a ride. She would, occasionally, glance back at the door to the apartment that she had just vacated, both hoping and fearing that the young man she had just deserted would come after her. Show her he loved her.

But he did not love her, the observer realized, for how can one love when one is incomplete?

The other knew his thoughts. “Yes,” he said. “I AM love, and only when they are one with me—and thus whole and complete—can they truly love anything. Each other, my creation, me. Even themselves.”

A fire engine red car sped into the parking lot outside the apartment complex. The young man in the driver’s seat wore a predatory expression, his hunger ten times that of the man the young woman had just left. The driver reached across the passenger seat to open the door for the woman, who dropped her cigarette hastily on the ground and with one last glance at the door of the apartment she had just left, got into the car.

The other sighed. “She will bind herself to this other young man, too, and many other things I never meant for her to do.” His voice took on a note the observer couldn’t identify. “I have so much more for her than this!” And the power in his voice shook the observer, and the young woman even glanced upward, as if she had possibly heard some faint echo of the truth, but it was just beyond her reach.

“Will she ever find it?” the observer asked. “Will she ever find you?”

The other smiled. “One day,” he said, “after a long journey to the bottom of the abyss, she will meet me in someone who is already one with me. We shall be a light in that dark place and she will want what this person has. Then she shall submit to the process and become who she really is.”

“Who is she?” the observer asked.

“MINE.”