Embracing Eternity

She snuggled into the couch, convincing herself that she had let go, and that, damn, it felt good to cuddle. But with whom? Not even the rum in her tea could drown the echoes, the memories, the recollections. The small molecules that produced the taste danced on her tongue. But not even the blanket around her shoulders could truly warm her up.

The flames looked like flexible yellow clots of fluid cream performing little sweet rhumbas in the air. The cracks that left the heat seemed to be small pests, provocative rebel yells in the light. Inside that fireplace, the fire danced. The scent of cinnamon curved in meandering pathways up her nostrils, her lungs filled with the warm air from the open fireplace. The stereo sound of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker still competed with the banging of the raindrops. The warmth on her skin grew as a cascade of raindrops smattered against the window. But as the music lingered, every artefact in her house reminded her of him. Paul. How do you drown spiritual pain? The person she had loved returned in her mind, blackmailing her with sharp dread.

“Be patient,” she heard her inner voice mumble, “you lost him just ten months ago.”

She had not touched the gift her suitor had given her yesterday. It stood on the mantlepiece waiting like a rose not yet accepted by the garden. It was closed for repair. The garden missed a gardener named Paul.

Roger’s choice of wine fell upon the spicy Spanish sort, so he had announced yesterday with sympathetic compassion, giving her the bottle at the party. That and a choice of grapes and crackers and cheese, he had said lovingly, would give her a long-promised and so urgently needed battery charge. He had even said he could come over and share it with her.

His twinkle entailed a plea to let him love her.

No. Too early. Too painful. Too much sorrow.

There would be no lovemaking today. No cuddles. No kisses. Just an empty house. And a woman alone in her bed. By choice.

Susie picked up the smartphone that lay in her lap.

Roger’s picture from the party almost came popping out on its own in her WhatsApp file. Her with the champagne in her hand, him with the sherry. Both beaming. Her personal manager Sarah pressing her cheek against Susie’s face in extreme giddiness. The loudspeakers gently playing the greatest Christmas hits of the last century. Bing Crosby crooning alongside George Michael, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank and Elvis alongside, of course, Andy Williams promising the most wonderful time of the year. Mel Tormé? Chipmunks roasting on an open fire? Sarah’s joke would’ve been funny had Susie not eagerly tried to conceal what she felt. Turkey and stuffing and cranberries on every plate, she had marched around the room.

“CEOs suffer in solitude,” she had mumbled. “After all, tomorrow is another day.”

Susie took another look at Roger’s picture.

A moment passed, Susie wondering if that thought was based in a lie.

No one could be replaced.  

“My first Christmas without you,” she whispered to herself, that rum stinging her larynx.

When she went to bed, he still lay in that bed next to her. When she sat at the dinner table, episodes of “Beyond Belief” flickering across the TV-screen, Paul sat there next to her, smiling at Jonathan Frakes mysterious innuendos. Her deceased husband was turning into an addiction. Memories of kisses and hugs, him inside her, promises of eternal love.

Once Roger’s face had been pushed back into Susie’s subconscious, her sister’s reprimands returned with a vengeance.

“Why you livin’ in dat big house all on yo’ own, sistah?”

Thea’s voice rang loudly in her inner ear, her niece banging her spoon against the cup back home.

“You take a week off from work and stay with us in New Orleans, you hear? Roger likes you. Grab him ‘fore ‘nother gal gets him.”

That sounded as if Roger were a discount frying pan at Walmart.

“Take him with you. We’ll all drive back to yo’ place for New Year’s.”

“I’m just honoring Paul’s memory.”  

“Paul would not want you to suffer, girl.”

Thea’s twang reminded Susie that she had spoken like that before college, as well, before taking those speech seminars. But the backdrop of the outdrawn Louisiana lilt touched a nerve.

“Whatcha gonna do in dat house all bah yo’self on Christmas Eve? Get Roger into that house, wine ‘n dine ‘im or let ‘im wine ‘n dine yo’ and get rolling in those sheets o’ yours. Make some babies. Hell, I can’t stand seeing you curl up and die.”

“I’m not dying, Thea,” she had croaked. “It just takes time.”

“To hell with time. You be the master of time. Get going.”

“You have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Indeed, I do.”

“Your husband is still alive.”

Good old sis’d had it all planned, too, hadn’t she? She had replaced her ex-husband with a new boyfriend the day after the divorce had gotten through. But this had been the love of Susie’s life.

Those harsh words echo in her inner ear now.

Inside the flames of her fireplace, Susie saw the sparks of light Paul had called “little dancing angels”. And as further tears ran down her cheeks, Susie felt that remorse in her soul and she swore to hold on to it, punishing herself with memory. It felt awful, but that pain almost contained a promise that if she held on to it enough, maybe she could reverse reality and switch into a universe where Paul had survived his cancer and was still alive.  

Susie had tried to scoff off her sister’s criticism.

“You’re coming over on the 31^st. Dad’s bringing Scrabble, isn’t he? Mom will be cooking, right? The TV will be on. My niece will be happy to have me read her some Winnie the Pooh books. I won’t have time to mourn.”

Thea had snapped, angrily, “You livin’ in de past. He still in dat house, gir, I’m positive he wants you to go on.”

“Gimme a break.”

“Give yo’self a break.”

That weird silence had become a nuisance, so Susie leafed her memory for things to talk about. How were things in the neighborhood? Was Dad still golfing? Had Thea finished Mom’s quilt yet? Her niece, did she still have that persistent cold? And what about Henry’s job? Did Thea’s husband still have trouble getting along with his boss?

They changed subjects, but it was clear that her sister did not agree with her not letting go. That picture of Roger grinning, sherry close to his face, it was obvious that he liked her.

Susie sat up, gulped down her hot drink and poured herself another cup, along with a shot of Captain Morgan’s. Shaking her head, she swore not to feel sorry for herself anymore. “Paul’s not dead, just out of body.”

Maybe it was Susie trying her best to pick up her senses that did the trick, because when she did, something happened. Something extraordinary.

The sudden whiff came as a shock. So much so that Susie jumped up from the couch, dropping the Samsung Galaxy onto the floor. The plate of crackers and grapes almost fell off the edge of the pillow where it stood, but only an inch had saved it. The strange sensation of an angelic visitor travelled through her spirit like smoke embracing a pillar.

The smell was intense, just as strong as had Paul been standing next to her. He would come in from work on an autumn day, the wind blowing through the front door and that sexy whiff of Calvin Klein would come shooting up her nostrils. But there was no open door here and no male perfume to speak of.

“I’ll be damned,” Susie spoke. “Eternity.” Okay, this was more a whisper. The smell, as weird as that sounded, was loud and clear. She had even heard the scientist Jim Al-Khalili say in a documentary that ear molecules communicated through scents. “I’m smelling Paul’s after shave.”

The bottle of Calvin Klein had not been thrown away, but Susie had put it in what she called Paul’s shrine in the box back in his office. She sat by it regularly, almost praying to his remains. But this smell had come seemingly from nowhere. Or had it? No, this smell was right here in this room. The cologne was upstairs closed into an unopened box.

“Where does that smell come from?” Susie sang. “Something break?”

That whiff now grew so strong in her nose, the smell of Calvin Klein’s Eternity, that her nose hairs seemed to wrinkle. The wind that blew around the corner of her house, it whistled. It reminded her of another Broadway tune Paul and her had loved. “Whistle down the wind, let your voices carry, drown out all the rain … for I have always been right here, oh, yeah.”

The neon flash of the smartphone lighting up on the floor was uncanny, especially since not just anything appeared on it. Impossible as though it might have seemed, Susie’s memorial page on her Facebook profile page appeared. It had not even been open in her files. But there it was, Paul’s picture smiling at her, that vacation photo of him back in the Grand Canyon ten years ago during what had to have been the most sensual time of their life.

Susie picked up the phone and looked at it.

Funny, how hope seemed to travel up from her belly, transporting across her body. No more of that sad Susie hating the world. One whiff of Eternity and the gal was grinning from ear to ear.

Biting her lip, she let her index finger gently caress the screen, her breath now deep and solemn. She turned around, facing the couch, closing her eyes, swearing she felt his energy embracing her. Not since he had died had she felt this in this house. That warm sensation of a person she knew and respected, his persona, his happy-go-lucky twinkle mixed with a gentleman’s valor.

“Impossible,” she spoke.

The universe is a weird place.

Her college professor back in Chicago said that repeatedly, even now when she chatted with him from time to time. What happened next would have been totally unbelievable in a Hollywood movie. In fact, Paul and she probably would have discarded it completely as movie kitsch had they seen it in the cinema. And yet, now with the rain having stopped, the thirty-something neighbor, had chosen this exact time to walk his terrier. She could see his blond mane beneath the parka hood. Okay, that wasn’t weird. What was weird, though, was that the guy was listening to a song that fit so well with her moment in time. Susie carefully listened to hear what it was. The original version of a song from their favorite movie, sung by Idina Menzel, had been playing on a loop during his last hours of life. He had even asked Susie to have it be played at his funeral and now, for some odd reason, just as Eternity reeked here in the room, his favorite song could be heard playing outside.

“Let it go,” Idina could be heard singing out of the neighbor’s smartphone as Queen Elsa in the film ‘Frozen’, “I am one with the wind and sky. You’ll never see me cry. Here I stand and here I cry.”

Susie dropped to the floor, the little dancing angels in the fireplace now doing merengues instead of rhumbas. The tears streamed down her face in what had to be the hottest physical water in existence. Clutching her blanket, knuckles whitening, she sobbed like a little girl, realizing that favorite teddy bear had saved someone else’s life.

How can you grin and sob at the same time?

“Paul?” she sobbed, wearily, “you really want me to let go?”

Susie could have sworn that she heard the wind whisper “Yes” into her ear. A yes to love. A yes to connection. A yes to embracing eternity. A yes to letting go.  

Obviously, it took a long time for Susie to get up, eventually pouring more rum into her cinnamon tea than her brain could handle.

“Widows usually turn into alcoholics,” she muttered, drying her tears.

A faint voice in the back of her mind whispered: “Not this one.”

It took what seemed to be an eon for her to move, that feeling of weird mystery making her feel like a lost soul caught in limbo.

She looked up at the empty TV-screen, wondered what life was like for a soul caught in limbo. But Paul wasn’t. She was sure he was here. No, Susie was in limbo. Pretty much gone with the wind.

So she flicked on her Netflix account, letting Scarlett flicker across the screen, hoping that watching people also gone with the wind would save her. Susie ended up falling asleep way before Rhett announced that he, frankly, did not give a damn. Before Butterfly McQueen even began saying she knew nothing about birthing babies, Susie disappeared into dreamland.

In the dream, Susie and Paul were back at the Grand Canyon, sitting on a cliff, looking at the sky. He was reading her a story. That had not been unusual back then. Now as then, Susie’s trouble falling asleep had turned her into a frenetic insomniac. The only thing that had saved her before sleeping pills or rum had been Paul’s voice reading her stories. This one was a tale of two cities.

Dickens novel had always fascinated Susie.

In her view, the book encompassed all of life.

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”

The contradictions of life were all in there, the mishaps alongside the triumphs, the impossible striving for perfection and the beautiful mistakes that made them all human. Aristocrats blamed for mistakes they had not made, Queens hated for being foreigners and being quoted as saying things they never ever said. Truly, during the dream Susie realized that she was living in a contradiction. She looked at her deceased husband as she heard him reading the story to her. He read the lines so eloquently, in his familiar way, always looking toward Susie to see if she had fallen asleep yet.

Then, about three pages into the book, he stopped, looking at her with a shy love. It was a modest love. She was almost asleep in the dream, smiling at him through half-closed eyes. A snooze within a nap, a dream within a dream.

“What?” she whispered.

“You know I love you.”

She nodded at him. “Yes. And I love you.”

That warm feeling returned again; a feeling centered in her heart. It was so natural, like he had never left her.

“But you also realize that I am tearing you apart.”

She sat up, as if someone had just pricked her with a needle.

“What do you mean?”

Paul raised a hand and caressed her cheek, suddenly causing Susie to realize she was not by the Grand Canyon anymore. It was hard for her to say if she was dreaming this or living it for real.

“You can invite me into your heart when you love that other man. I will show you God’s kingdom when you embrace him at night and you won’t be unfaithful to me. The Hindus call that Tantra. I am there when you awake in the morning, when you go to sleep at night, when you laugh and cry and scream and hope and wonder and doubt and love and when you smile,” he spoke, softly. “Love is love. You need affection. I cannot watch you suffer anymore.”

He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, gently.

“Let me go and I will become one with your past, giving you a present that will become your future.”

Susie awoke again with a start, the fire now almost gone but the warmth increasing. That cup of tea was still there on the table, half-full and reeking of rum. Rhett had long since left Scarlett to herself and Netflix was now calling it a day. The neighbor with the terrier had snuggled up into his sheets with his wife and the dog was most probably keeping them awake with snores.

Paul had been there that evening. The dream had been like a story within a story. A departed soul telling her a story within the story of a dream that was a tale within the story of a life.

“The Hindus call that Tantra. I will show you God’s kingdom when you embrace him at night and you won’t be unfaithful. Love is love.”

Susie called Roger that next morning and he did come over for tea and scones. They listened to some Tchaikovsky and talked about Spanish wines. This inspired them to open Roger’s wine.

The Christmas festivities were solemn, but at the party on that December 31^st sparks flew and even Susie felt as if something inside her opened up. A fist unclenching, a door ajar.

Paul’s soul came back in Susie’s dream that night, as she lay in Roger’s arms. In the dream, Paul read Susie a passage from another Dickens novel named “Great Expectations”. They were again together on the cliff overlooking the Grand Canyon. She was not sure what warmth was greater, the sun or Paul’s love. She quickly decided that Paul’s love was the sun.

This time, Susie knew that she had another guardian angel, one that had been her husband once upon a time.

Roger and Susie married on a Friday. It was a full church and an even fuller festive hall. Plenty of time to cure massive hangovers for a company that had been given a free weekend.

She wanted to give herself a birthday present. The gift of letting go. Thea? She was there to tell the company how proud she was that her

“Sis’ was lettin’ go, y’all!”

That next year, a little baby boy was born.

Susie immediately saw the twinkle in his eye, the modest spark that seemed to be of gentlemanly valor. He very soon began taking great interest in the books of Charles Dickens and even started inquiring about places like the Grand Canyon. Susie knew that Paul had come back home, his soul now residing in the body of a small child.

“Let me go and I will become one with your past, giving you a present that will become your future.”

Then and there, Susie realized the truth of living.

We never ever say goodbye.

We just change our garments to fit the shape of our hearts.

Our lives are like our dreams: stories within stories.

THE END

Bio: Charles E.J. Moulton was born on September 8th, 1969. His mother was the renowned operatic mezzosoprano and Vienna Music Academy vocal professor Gun Kronzell (1930 – 2011) and his father was the author, actor and baritone Herbert Eyre Moulton (1927 – 2005). Charles is the Editor-in-Chief of “The Creativity Webzine.” 148 of his literary pieces have been published in international magazines, including short stories, articles and academic research papers. He is the author of “Aphrodite’s Curse: 21 Tales of Love and Terror” (published by Meizius Publishing on September 21st, 2015, available through Amazon and in selected bookstores). His stories are spread throughout the web and he is currently working on a novel. He has been a regular contributor for The Screech Owl and Idea Gems, has written for The Horror Zine, Asylum Ink, Cheap Jack Pulp, Contemporary Literary Review India, SNM, TWJ, Paradigm Shift, Shadows Express, Aphelion, Skirmish, Idea Gems, Shadows Express, Redhead, The Woven Tale Press, Socrates, Blood Moon Rising and Indiana Voice Journal and the Swedish magazine Barometern. Among the genres he has covered are academic research papers, opinions, reviews, literary fiction, spirituality, mystery, crime, fantasy, romance, erotica, sci-fi, horror and drama. Charles has also been a stage performer since age eleven. His has sung and acted in 115 stage productions to date, countless cross-over concerts, work as a drama- and a vocal-coach, as the big band vocalist of The J.R. Swing Connection and concert work with The Charming Boys, The Charles Moulton Band, The NPW Philharmonic Orchestra, Mother’s Darling and The 4-Men Trio. He spent a day in June of 2015 filming a soccer film for the Schalke Arena, he appeared on the cable channel SAT 1-afternoon show “Auf Streife”, has recorded voice-overs for Swedish films, collaborated with people like Luciano Pavarotti and played a performance of “Dance of the Vampires” in Vienna for Johnny Depp. He worked as a trilingual tourguide at the Renaissance palace in Kalmar, Sweden and is a filmmaker, translator, director, conductor, drama-coach, singing-teacher who teaches Italian in his free time. He has worked as a radio-speaker and is also a painter with sold and exhibited work. Among his stage roles, you will find Scar in The Lion King, Masetto in Don Giovanni and Young Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Mr. Moulton is married and has a daughter.

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Charles E.J. Moulton

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