| All original songs, writing and real-time performances BY ANGELO M. BRUSCAS III Copyright 2009, Real News Network and AMBIII Publishing THE FUTURE When I waded into the sea I hadn’t even learned how to swim Yet still I floated as in a dream Until the tide washed my body Back to her beaches When I walked into the room She didn’t even know my name Yet somehow I felt to blame For everything that would happen In the future . . . When she smiled and took me in I had never seen her face Yet somehow it all fell into place Like I had been staring forever At her picture . . . When I opened up the door I heard someone call out a name Yet it never did sound the same As when she called to tell me There was no future . . . Reflections of a thousand years She has left me here with no tears. No fears She has painted me into a corner To drift alone at morning To float along in mourning When I waded into the sea I heard someone call out a name I knew I would take the blame For everything that would happen In the future . |
| Song of Cecilia is a literary journey of love and a lyrical joyride into the triumphs and depths of marriage and divorce through these ever-shifting sands of economic, moral and social turmoil – a novel about the mythic and mystical music two lovers create when they begin to believe and then shatter the myths they adopt for their lives. The contemporary mystery-romance storyline of 112,000 words unwinds as a modern twist on “The Divine Comedy” with obvious similarities to “The Great Gatsby” -- told through the eyes of a writer in the maze of a major life transformation; the spiraling economy has put an end to his newspaper, sparking a renewed search for personal redemption and reconnection with the lost love and the lost music of his life. His lost love has taken on the myth of St. Cecilia, martyred for the love of God, sacrificed for the music of angels. The central theme is the universality of love, the endurance of the love of friends and family, even the love of God, through the love of writing or rediscovering the love songs within us all: That joyful noise of life. The story is highlighted by the “language of love” crafted by the central characters, Mario and Cecilia, in letters, songs, poetry, factual experience and fictional expression, assuming and then consuming their namesakes in the myth of an angel and the myth of the patron saint of music . |
Song of Cecilia
Chapter Three
Chapter Three
| I always think I’ll be able to write more graphically of what I imagine and experience -- great erotic images -- and I can write the script in my head, dictate it even, but when I get down to the business of wanting to put those images so as to arouse you, make you proud and excited, they are incomplete without the emotions behind them and those details of imagination forsake my pen. -- Cecilia in a letter to Mario after a night of love in 1988 SONG OF CECILIA: Unbearable Weight of Beings Over the course of her love life, Cecilia began to believe she was better off in the long run with a one- or two-syllable man, rather than a three-syllable delusional angel like Mario Angelo. All her other husbands were that way, even when she called them by their full names like Michael or Patrick or Clayton. Things just got too complicated when she was shouting Mario’s name into the heavens night after night, riding so high on the sail between his strong and always open-wide wings. She was better off, she felt, with a man named Clay after already writing off Mario as a piece of solid sculpture in her artistic vision of love. She needed a man she could reshape into something less-mythological and more utilitarian in her new vision of life. She needed a shorter rhythm, a quicker shout and a calmer release. Flying now gave her vertigo and visions she could barely see. It wasn’t always that way, she conceded, recalling all the nights she and Mario made love on the floor, she slipping into something sheer and sensual and siren-like after putting her son to bed -- every night it seemed for years and years and then every morning to start the day. Just like she had written to him of her past desires and experiences, they created new ones of amazing abundance, sharing each other’s full spirits on a cliff over a waterfall on the coast of Oregon, in bed for days looking out at the wild ocean in winter, from New York to San Francisco, in his grandmother’s home in Pacific Grove, on the road everywhere, from Vancouver to Victoria, anywhere their souls traveled, anything they each desired was given to the other. She felt so beautiful back then, raven hair flowing onto her raised nipples that stayed hard all night long just like Mario, the fruit of her body ripening in the heat of Mario’s muscular heart, like her tall, taunt, lean and windswept frame had finally found its perfect match in the shelter from the storm of Mario’s abundant garden of love. And he would always raise her up on top where everything just seemed to fit perfectly. Her head would roll back, eyes closed and suddenly, truly, ecstatically, she was lifted into the heavens, shouting out his name. She pulled out a letter she had written to Mario, one he’d disdainfully returned to her in a pile of bile he packaged up and dropped on her doorstep after she decided to make their divorce final. It was written during a time when they had sex every night they were ever together. Heck, night and morning, but Cecilia especially loved it in the afternoon. The letter was now 20 years old, but instead of making her feel that same passion and heat of Mario’s love again -- as she read the words she herself had written -- it made her feel like she had simply been living a myth burning inside her soul all her life. She started to wonder how she could ever have given such words to Mario, igniting a fire that still raged so white hot, “white light, white heat, going a blue streak,” but in a different firestorm of words now, like an onslaught of hot flashes she could never have contemplated when she first wrote this: “Mario, my resolve to immediately attend to household duties tonight has faded like a mirage wavering in the desert heat. I have the energy and will address those things yet tonight, but my mind is full of images suspended from last night’s lovemaking.” “I took my usual morning break and leaned over the concrete railing at Pier 54, and was transported back to bed, back to your arms, back to your straightforward passion. It occurred to me that the nature of your order is somehow different from other men. I know what it is to be desired and to inspire lust or passion or love. There is something different about your desire and I struggled to name it for myself. I decided that your passion has no demand, it requires no answer. “Other men who claimed to love me demanded my response, or even tried to coerce it from me. They had some expectations or saw as their due lovemaking on demand. Maybe they didn’t have the imagination or sensitivity to create the atmosphere for reciprocity. Or maybe it’s just me who has changed. I’m not talking about technique or skill, because that will only take you so far. I will always put forth the argument that sex is much more a mental exercise as it is physical acrobatics, and much more. “I look back on the first few times of our physical intimacy -- the mental intimacy was already established -- and I see a tremendous shift. I sense that your fears are dispelled, trust is established, and you are free to express yourself -- that “lightness of being” to lay naked by your side.” Yes, yes, yes, Cecilia sighed under her breath and tears that blotched the blue ink of her own handwriting with blue streaks -- she had lived her love, baring her soul, like an open book for Mario, and he had responded like a true Angel, like they were destined for a life of literature. Now, the letters just came back to haunt her, especially realizing that Mario could never fully close the book on the words she truly had given him from the Gods of love above. God damn it, she said to herself, she even gave him the full “reign” of his potential and now he seemed to be taking it to new limits or without limits altogether. Now, she had only her own words to blame for what seemed like an unending sense of shame and personalized pain that began when she herself granted him “full reign” on all that would rain forth to this day. “I wanted ever so much to be able to give you that reign of your potential, to raise it from dormancy to ascending, no pun intended. Your open passion and its expression take me with its beauty. You are so beautiful to me. That is how I feel so satisfied and so insatiable at the same time. “A week ago, you told me that you try to put me first when we are together, to be wholly there for me when the circumstances allow it. It moved me when you said that because I try to do the same for you. “There is something about your love that moves me inexplicably, draws me away from hunger or pain, or animal exhaustion to that world of total concentration, and I am drawn back to that place and surrender happily to it. “Sometimes I see these moments and imagine it is sculpture -- my marble Adonis, smooth and silky and polished. Your outline so solid and weightless, defying nature and yet so much of nature. “I always think I’ll be able to write more graphically of what I imagine and experience -- great erotic images -- and I can write the script in my head, dictate it even, but when I get down to the business of wanting to put those imaged so as to arouse you, make you proud and excited, they are incomplete without the emotions behind them and those details of imagination forsake my pen. I am writing only for you. “Love, Cecilia.” Cecilia had wanted to burn the letter so many times but just put it back with all the others that she had written to Mario over the years and placed the file folder at the bottom of a box of her personal belongings that were still piled in the garage at her new home in Yakima. She knew Mario still had all the copies, even writing some of them into an abandoned attempt he had horribly made to regurgitate all their love once before in that piece of crap book he called “The Real Story.” Well, this letter WAS real and IS real and Cecilia simply could no longer take her love and her life exposed this way ever again. She didn’t write like this anymore. This wasn’t her anymore, she told herself. She had changed. Same face, angelic and certain and longing but without hardly a wrinkle or mark or blemish to show age or time. She looked in the mirror as she paced about her new living room and all the furniture that was not hers and had no trace of Mario. Her hair was back to the way she had worn it when she first fell in love with Mario, colored now to hide the gray, but returned to its fullness, even after the chemo had reduced her head to being balder than Mario’s. "The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful... Their love story did not begin until afterwards: she fell ill and he was unable to send her home as he had the others. Kneeling by her as she lay sleeping in his bed, he realized that someone had sent her downstream in a bulrush basket. I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory." -- Milan Kundera from “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” Yes, she had to admit, he still loved her with an undeniable patience and even a unique passion when she lost her hair, when her lump was discovered, when her breast was taken off, when it was put back together; even when she banished him and moved to divorce him, he continued to love her through another battle with cancer. But she was so, so afraid back then that she could never again be the woman that she was, that even she had written of, when she sensed Mario’s love began straying toward other women. She could never heal herself if Mario was not going to be fully there to help her build a new life free of the disease that haunted her, even free of her own guilt and shame for the way she broke up their home and their life in a fall from grace she could never live down. She could not rise up from that alone with Mario if he was not going to be the man he always should have lived up to be, either, and all he was writing was garbage about sports and living a lie trying to be a rock star or a real life journalist of no substance, smoking way too many substances that deluded his mind and tarnished his wings. She could not deny she wrote Mario into her soul, into her womb, even, but like a child, she had to let that amazingly beautiful love grow up, grow old, and move out on its own. She was proud of how she looked now. Complete again. Back to being Cecilia. No more cancer. No more Mario. Once, uniquely Angelique, the last name she had taken for herself to renounce the name of her father and to state her own independence from the men she would come to marry, never taking on their last names as a badge of honor and pride until she could no longer resist or hold back her own identity any longer. Now, she had fully assumed the identity of another man with her hormones finally coming back into balance for the first time in years. And then, suddenly, back again comes the soaring Angel, the marble Adonis, the “Unbearable Lightness of Being,” just like that first novel by Milan Kundera she had ever given Mario to read in their ever-so-adventurous true book of love, the first movie that marked their love when it came out in 1988. What the hell was she going to do now? Instead of making her feel light this time, the letters were weighing her down like nothing she had ever experienced. They had become like the cancer. It was like their entire story of love was starting all over again and there was absolutely nothing she could do this time to stop it from invading her life, her home, her heart, her soul. She knew where Mario was going with the story and she feared this time it would never end until the world knew it and understood it as well as the two of them lived it. The book centers on Nietzsche's idea of eternal return - that is, the idea that the universe and all the events therein have all happened before, and will continue to recur ad infinitum. Kundera challenges this idea, offering an alternative: each of us has only one life to live, and what happens once will never occur again. He calls this idea "lightness," and refers to the concept of eternal return as "heaviness" or "weight." -- Wikipedia’s synopsis of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera Dear Cecilia, June, 2009 I think even you would find the humor readily apparent in this anecdote: When I first started to put this new chapter together, I wrote the title first, and realized after getting into the first two pages of your letter that I had misspelled the very first word. It read, “DONG OF CECILA: Unbearable Weight of Being.” Now that was a pun that was unintended, too!!! I love that letter you wrote to me like I love letters I have saved from my grandmother’s hand. It is one of the greatest letters anyone could ever write anyone, and that it is to me from you is a true honor in my life. I am humbled to have loved you like that, to be compared to something as lasting in time as the marble statue of Adonis. To have made you at one time feel the true “lightness of being.” Maybe Kundera was oh so right, you can never live your life again, but then again, you do, if you just keep repeating the same mistakes or just keep writing the same story of love, over and over. We each are guilty of that love crime, for sure. I have decided, for example, that to break free of this on my own, I will refuse to ever love another woman romantically again -- even try to -- having fully experienced an amazingly rich life of love with you that I would never want to replicate or repeat with another person. That doesn’t mean I don’t think it isn’t worth repeating, even rewriting here, or trying to honor it all by shining the true light of art and literature, song and spirituality on all the love that remains. I just don’t find it valuable any longer to seek out love of anything less than what you already gave me. Finding that again is like being drawn in – enlightened -- in by an amazingly vibrant work of art, say a marble Adonis or an Italian Renaissance rendering of Saint Cecilia in the memory museum of our wondrous souls. I wish I no longer had to find such a novel approach to visualizing my love for you in the present, but memories have a way of seeming all the more relevant in my current life of peace, joy, happiness, understanding and contentment, even a life of relative celibacy and realized sexual dormancy due to my own choice, my own desire to live a more literate life that just feels right. Maybe that’s how you feel, too, so I can only hope these words that I give back to you will not seem like a fiction any longer, or part of a romanticized past, but will turn into something real and lasting that both of us can live with and love as long as we both shall live, even into eternity. I write you real letters in the present as if you were my editor in this book of love, much like Steinbeck did in writing “East of Eden.” Like Steinbeck, I have been haunted by how to tell this story of my life for years and years now, and I think I have finally gotten it right. I wanted to be able to explain our amazing love, even the end of it, to people who knew us well and were never able to understand how two people so in love could fall so far apart. I also wanted to explain how I believe I came to rediscover the true love of God, the love that is the key to universal truth, in the love that passed through me, or into me, through the life and death of my grandmother. In doing so, of course, I find the universal truth in the love you always had for me, and the love I continue to have for you. If that isn’t worth writing about, I don’t know what else matters in life. For me, it just comes naturally, like gaining weight only to shed it all and run free once again. Rising before dawn today, I write from the other side of my house, where I have computers set up at both the north end in my master bedroom and in the south end in my office. I look north now into the pines and shards of sunlight trying to break through the morning fog. Writing this way, in two distinctly different settings, seems to help open up different perspectives, and I’m not sure why exactly that is. Kind of like the rhythms change, along with the pace and thought patterns that lead me to destinations I’m not even sure I planned on going in the first place. I think I slept so restlessly last night with thoughts of you because I know the story is indeed going public in some fashion. The restlessness also comes with thoughts of how I have already taken far too many fictional liberties with your current life, and it is something I would like to discuss here with you since you will not allow me to discuss this with you in person. I realize fully that you are where you are for reasons that I certainly cannot change with words, or even pure love, even invoking the love God appears to truly have for me and my life. I have tried to imagine what those reasons are, and here’s what I have come up with: 1. You attract a certain type of man like a magnet, drawn to you by your beauty and wisdom and strength. Someone else fell in love with you as much as I fell in love with you many, many, many years ago. That man offered you a place to retreat from the battles of our marriage, a security with a peaceful home, a quiet environment, a place where you could feel part of the community again instead of surrounded by a neighborhood that only put you on edge or gave you bad memories of the past. 2. You needed a fresh start in life, a place where you could continue your quest for knowledge, where you might even find your family roots, and an atmosphere that didn’t seem so fraught with daily chaos, like massive traffic jams, road rage, Mario sightings, etc. 3. You needed a place to start a new spiritual quest, to make peace with God after the second scare with cancer. To recover, fully, your inner soul that you know will be what you carry with you into the next life no matter what comes between us now or forevermore. 4. You accepted that love from someone else, and the only way you could have done that is if you fully came to terms with the end of our love, at least in your mind at the time it was accepted. You saw no more of a future with me than I saw in my own future at the time (like in my song, The Future, that I wrote back then, where I am just floating with the tides trying to find my way back “to her beaches”). So someone else offered you a new and different future, and you took it under the condition that you would never go back to the past with me. 5. I made it all the more difficult by continuing to write you, write about you, even songs and posts on my personal Web sites, leaving you no option but to flee just to get away from my words and constant attempts at reconciliation and redemption in our love. Our love became corrupted and co-opted by my own hand. Like I was committing daily word suicide with everything that made our love truly the amazing love it once was. 6. You actually like being there, being the wife of someone nice, someone who has a nice job not a crazy one like a writer or a journalist, someone who is part of the community and not living like a broken-down angel or a failed artist or a pretend rock star. You like the pace of life now, the climate, the town, even the people who you have begun to become good friends with. To leave now would be to leave new roots that you feel are ready to blossom into the life you will now live until your final days on earth. I think those reasons are all totally valid and any one of them certainly would be reason enough for you to stay where you are for the rest of life to come, just like I have so, so, so many reasons why I ended up moving here to the coast and why I finally became brave enough to truly accept the reasons why I fully choose to live and remain alone. That’s why I can’t imagine trying to actually change anything at all here, except the story as I once so badly told it. I already have had a total transformation in everything else in life – my home, my job, even my family with my kids grown and no wife in sight to speak of, my dog, my beliefs about God and truth and love – so trying to reach a transformation in the writing is just something that seems to come naturally for me. That doesn’t mean I believe I can transform you or your place and space, even your beliefs and reasons for living your life the way you choose, and I hope and pray that freedom of choice rings out true and honestly throughout the book and the writing at hand. You were the one who truly once gave me a choice that would transform my life much in the same way I imagine your life has been transformed now by someone else. So I also imagine that over time you will feel a lot like I did in our marriage, with me moving into your home, a home already beset by past marital breakdowns with a history of obstacles that can never fully be surmounted, only knocked down ingloriously one by one like the hurdles that your youngest son ran over in his famous track video that got him on national TV on “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Of course many of my fears were unfounded, but they were always there in the letters you wrote and received from old friends, or in the photos of your past marriages, even unpleasant things I would stumble on from time to time, just the feeling that what I had surrounding me was never fully mine or ours, but yours and of your past and of your past life that I was never really a part of. That was hard for me, so I imagine over time it also will be hard for you. Likewise, the decision I’m sure already has transformed the man who loves you now like I once loved you, maybe even transforming him in many of the very same ways your love helped make me into the man I am today. He is bolder and braver for you. He is solid for you. He helps you with everything. He is sweet and nice to you, happy and joyous just to be in your company. You know his love won’t just go away or get angry or turn on you in ways that are entirely unpredictable. Being a good man, he can hide his doubts and his fears well. Having friends and family, he can fall back always on the support around him to give his life fullness while he learns to love you with all the love he has ever learned from those who love him most. You realize his love is the same sort of love that I had for you without all the drama, without all the writing, without all the history, and it all just makes perfect sense. So what is, IS, as you would say to me so long ago when you made a case and wrote a long, long letter to me about why I should leave Lori and love you instead. Maybe it was easier to convince me, since I obviously have gotten nowhere near convincing you of anything, I know, I know. I think the difference was that I already was in love with you and in a marriage that restricted my freedom to be exactly the person I am now. You gave me the freedom to truly be the writer, the lover, the journalist, the husband, the gardener, the father, the angel I should have been -- and am now and always was in the choice to accept the gifts of your love. Those gifts you detailed in full in those letters to me like the letters I write now. Like you back then, I want only to free your true spirit, your soul, the essence of who you are and always will be. If you feel that is where you are now, then I am happy and joyful that you are where you are. I know you would have accepted life and love had I not chosen you, too, way back when, but you would have continued to love me in spirit and soul much the way I think I still love you right now. We simply inspired each other too much. We simply sparked everything and everything sparked for us. The choice became no choice at all in the end for me. It was just what seemed destined to be. So destiny finds us again at new destinations: Me, truly completing a novel of our love that is better than anything I have ever attempted in my writing life; you, truly living a quiet life of peace and contentment with not many cares in the world other than for your inner peace and spiritual fulfillment. You have no reason to leave and I have no reason to stop writing, to look for another REAL job or ever move back from my beautiful home on the coast. I keep thinking of that Patti Smith song, “Paths that cross, will cross again,” and how I used to think she was singing: “Pass the cross, the cross again.” Smile, you know what I’m saying here, don’t you? It’s all about truly listening. It’s all about perception. Sometimes you only hear what you want to hear or see what you want to see. For me, the process can take years, and I don’t know exactly why. Maybe because I spend so much time listening to my own voice, that I often fail to hear others, even when they are singing in perfect harmony with me. Okay, okay, okay. I know I have said enough and stated my case and it’s time to move onward and forward with the “Song of Cecilia.” If you let me or give me permission, I will return the name to its proper and rightful spelling in the book, because I think it really should be that way and should carry our actual names, but I will leave that choice up to you. Me, I have no trouble just being Mario. Hah! That was a joke. Or maybe it fell flat. Wednesday afternoon, I drove with Babe up the north coast to Moclips to walk out onto the last beach we wandered together with our old dog Layla on that fateful Valentine’s Day so long ago. I like being this close to that place, and I think I will make a special pilgrimage there in your honor every Valentine’s Day I live out here, which likely will be forever. On the way back, I stopped at the new Moclips Museum that is beginning to take on new life on the hill above the beach. It kind of reminded me of that day we stopped in the rain at the Galiano Island museum and the little old lady running the place told us that funny story of the nude postman who used to deliver the mail, covering his private parts with letters and magazines along his merry route. At Moclips, there was a group of Quinault women in the museum making these dream catchers with feathers and beads and fishing line that they are selling to raise funds for a new building, so I bought one for you that I will include when I finally complete this book of letters. I told the lady at the counter that I needed one that could catch dreams that have gotten away from me and I wasn’t so sure such a small dream-catcher would do the trick. “It’s not the size of the dream catcher, it’s how you use it that matters,” she laughed. So I guess that’s as close to a parable as I can get, and the dream goes on. I hope the gift will help you catch those dreams that got away and turn them into whatever reality suits you best. What I offer you now is not a dream, it is fully awake; it IS real. So is what you have now, I know, I know. But when you dream, what do you dream about? When you close your eyes in love and prayer, who do you think about? When you meditate on how you have lived your life, what do you see? Hold out this dream catcher to the wind and the sea, the sky and the rivers and the rain and the sun, and you will catch the dream of you and me. It’s a dream already in the net!!! Better to dream and catch them in this life, my love, than to chase them through a lifetime of repeating the same old scenes, with the same fitful fears and failures of the past always making the recurring dream a nightmare something neither one of us can sleep with in our bed of endless dreams. Better to fully realize the great dreams we already have caught rather than chasing new ones with a cheap new native dream catcher, I think. Yes, you were the dream weaver, Cecilia, and maybe I am now just a dream with the intricate knitting so unraveled it only leaves you sleepless and all the more tired with the once realized dream of our love tailing off into the past like the endless string on a kite that just never comes down in the wind of fate. Maybe the dream of this letter is just like another useless dream, something you don’t even pay attention to any more, something you are no longer interested in even reading or recalling in the conscious moments of your few remaining waking days on earth. You’ve had enough of dreams, and now is the time in your life to let the dreams fade away or make them real once and for all. All I know -- looking back on all that I have written to you, all that you once wrote and said and gave to me -- is that the dream certainly was real and it was realized; and if it was real, it IS real to this very day. Once a dream is realized, like a book that is finally written, the dream is no longer a dream – it is an indisputable fact of life. It is a living thing, just like a seed that is caught by the wind and the earth and nurtured by time and the rain and the sun, growing into a blossoming wildflower with brilliant colors for the world to see, bringing happiness and joy and new life to all who witness the beauty of nature as the cycle repeats itself again and again to produce a marvelous field of flowers, just like the one we basked in after finding the native rock carvings on Vancouver Island. Just like our love. With the love of the dream that you gave me and the dream I realize in every waking moment of my life now. And with the love in real time, too, in a time when my Lightness of Being is finally flying free on the true beach of my reality, not dreams that fall flat under the moon of gravity or the hot light of the blistering sun, Mario I want to make you laugh, sleep like an angel in my arms, fuck you blind and have you orgasm like crazy, stroke your forehead, kiss your eyes, whisper sweet nothings and sugarplum dreams, trap these emotions and breathe life into every cell, experience, passion and a deep abiding peace. -- Cecilia, in a letter to Mario, Christmas 1987 POSTSCRIPT: Searching garage sales this weekend for odds and ends to fill out my new beach home, I unearthed a videotape of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” the very first movie that you and I ever watched together back in 1988 when Daniel Day-Lewis made his fabulous debut as Tomas, the hero-lover-doctor-writer in the screenplay of Milan Kundera’s great book of love and art, sensuality and endurance through troubled times. After watching the movie in full for the first time in 20 years or so, it seems to me the over-arching theme is that art lives on while love is a fatal attraction. I love the eyes of Lena Olin as Sabina because they look so much like your eyes, wide open and always searching from a depth that does indeed have no light reflected back, only images of what can be seen in a mirror of life. Eyes that pull you in rather than set you free. Like the time her eyes seduce her married lover, who announces one day that he has left his wife to live with Sabina. When he returns to her apartment, she has vanished, moving on as quickly as she came onto him in the first place. I love the scene that follows when Tomas and Sabina make love for the final time and Sabina says to him: “Maybe I’m seeing you for the last time.” Tomas then kisses her deeply, naked and free, and after a long pause, answers: “Maybe.” When he leaves Sabina, he returns home only to find his wife Tereza has disappeared just like Sabina, not able to tolerate his indiscretions with other women any longer. All that’s left is this letter: “Tomas, I know I’m supposed to help you, but I can’t. Instead of being your support, I’m your weight. Life is very heavy to me. I need to be so light for you. I can’t build this freedom. I’m not strong enough. In Prague, I only needed you for love. In Switzerland, I depended upon you for everything. What would happen if you abandoned me? I am weak. I’m going back to the country of the weak. Goodbye.” -- From the 1988 movie, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being SAINT VALENTINE’S DAY Time to sing my song, Time to carry on The stars fell silent for a moment And I saw your face streak against the sky Time stood still and the heavens parted A voice called out to you and I The wind rose up and stopped my breathing I had never before been so alive Time to sing my song, Time to carry on The days grew humble without love You left me to wander to find my way The moon was hidden in the clouds Time had led us far astray It was then you told me of your cancer The time we prayed on St. Valentine's Day Time to sing my song, Time to carry on The sun stopped shining in your window And I felt the earth begin to shake I can still see the trees outside swaying I remember the exact look on your face The ocean fell still for a moment When we made love on St. Valentine's Day Time to sing my song, Time will carry on |
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