Her mind wandered as she stared up into the heavens and the falling sky. Absentmindedly she stuck her tongue out from between her teeth to catch the crystals was they drifted past. She gazed into the heavy, wintry clouds. This would be so romantic. Her mind had begun to think about him again; the object of her fictional love life, her someday husband. He would love this walk... she just knew it.
On days like this she tended to get caught up in daydreams of him. She stared up, high, as though trying to look through the clouds and into heaven itself. "Why are you keeping him from me, God?"
She had posed this question in her mind many times before, but here in this vacant wood she finally let it slip out, aloud. The truth was that she was disparately lonely in her heart. She felt like a huge part of her was missing, as though... if she could only capture that one out-of-reach thing she would be completely and purely happy. She was sure it was love.
She crested a hill and looked down into a familiar rocky clearing. A private exposure of the Great Canadian Shield, rimmed in tall, sturdy spruce and pine. This place had become a kind of friend to her, changing in the rhythm of the seasons and yet remaining ever the same. Someday she would take him here. Someday she would share this. Her question came to mind again, this time on the wind of a melody so often embraced by her heart. She closed her eyes and whispered the lyrics to the falling snow. "I get down on my knees and I start to pray til the tears run down from my eyes! Lord, somebody - please, somebody? Can anybody find me - somebody to love?"
It wasn't a comfortable combination. Something about the still beauty of the setting seemed to recoil at the 70's rock song. She walked into the middle of the clearing. It almost seemed... grieved.
"What's wrong?" she said, suddenly unsettled in the place that had always calmed her spirit and brought a peaceful smile to her face. The cloudy sky seemed to darken, to deepen, like a pair of eyes beginning to brim with tears. In the pit of her stomach, in the back of her heart, as though the air itself took the form of language and presented the thought to her mind, she heard an answer - almost like the still, small voice she had been training to hear.
"He will not fill your heart like I can fill it."
She paused, closed her eyes and tried to focus the grey of her mindspace, on nothing but that sound, that phantom voice, that ...angelic... voice.
"No mere mortal can love you like Me. I am the Great Lover, the Architect and Author of Romance. This place, this edenic refuge - this is my bouquet to you, my gift, a sign my doting affection. Be careful, o daughter, not to misplace the responding admiration."
She opened her eyes and looked again at the not-so-familiar grove. A circular gap in the clouds revealed the flood of the full moon's light and for a moment everything caught in it's beam shimmered and glistened like the dust of a polished blue gem. The vision stole her breath away.
"I love you," whispered the voice, fading ever softer as the clouds moved to cloak the moon again. "I have always loved you, from before you were, and I will love you for the endurance of eternity." And then she was again, quiet and still, standing in the middle of the clearance.
She said nothing aloud, neither to the voice nor the trees. She did nothing but breathe for a time: in and out, deep and full, cleansing, lifting, washing her spirit through.
And then she walked on; through the paths that wound around the clearing, and back home, she walked, quietly, reverently, no longer longing for something else. No longer alone.
