This was our last date. Our first and last date. The band played slowly, a waltz, and as we spiralled together, our hands clutched each other, defying our imminent separation, our closeness its cruellest reminder. This was our last date.
We were in the same class at University, both studying English for wont of a more specific subject and, at first, this was the source of the hesitancy that characterised our relationship. After all, what could be more uncomfortable than having a failed relationship with someone you would see for another four years?
I still remember my first sight of her. It happened in our second of four years at University. She was shorter than I, perhaps two inches under my 5’ 11”. She had shoulder length black hair that fell luminously to just beyond her shoulders. Her eyes were dark and framed by slender-rimmed glasses, her mouth was a pale red. We had been in a tutorial, its subject Dante. Appropriate, then, that here I had found my Beatrice.
Her voice was coolly English, a gem unflawed with a regional impurity. That’s not to say it lacked emotion - every word she spoke embraced multitudes. A burble of laughter in every syllable when she was amused, tight exasperation when she was in a temper and, best of all, genuine pleasure when she saw you. Whenever I said hello to her, her reply was enough to banish even the worst bad mood. When I first heard her speak, though, it was in anger.
There’s no greater hive of mediocrity than a University, where the majority of every class is made of inferior minds who attend because, like prisoners, they cannot exist without the routine - school, in this case - they have followed for 13 years. One of them had just said, of Dante’s Divine Comedy, that it was meaningless reading such a work nowadays - times had changed and it was now irrelevant. The usual banality of what might be called Pop Idol culture.
Celestine - not her real name, but what else can I call an angel - was furious, her cheeks turning the pale pink of her lips. “How the hell can you say that? His imagery, his themes… they’re unmatched in literature.” The lecturer supervising the tutorial clearly agreed. The frown he had worn when the first student had spoken had been replaced with a pleased look.
There’s something perverse in me, and something arrogant, and it was this element of my character that made me reply: “But then, is it worth reading it in anything other than Italian? Look how, when rendered in English, so much of the work’s subtlety is despoiled, in, say, the canto of Inferno dealing with traitors.” My redeeming quality is that I can usually present my brasher statements with enough humour to render them palatable. The lecturer and Celestine smiled. The other student, who presumably hadn’t heard of the poem before the class, covered his look of bemusement with an attempt at superiority.
Of course, the other reason I had made my highly academic comment had been the feeling when I had seen Celestine, rising from the sea of students like a messiah. It was a romantic cliché. My heart shuddered desperately as my blood turned solid and my chest seemed to shrink until air and life were reduced to a moment. My legs had felt strange, not as though turned to water, thank god, but as if a surfeit of electrical energy seared my nerves and invigorated them at the same time, making every motion both clumsy and over-responsive.
That was our first meeting, and it was where I fell in love with her. That statement is absurd - it insults love to claim that the lifelong bond developed between two people whose temperaments, natures and intellects mesh so perfectly that in the end they are one entity trying to dissolve their unnatural separation in the poor solution of sex. I’ve always loved easily, becoming entranced by the curve of a neck or the sound of a laugh or the variations in an expressive face until the next sea change of my life carries me away to some new infatuation. Perhaps it is most true to say that it was at first sight that I sensed I could love this woman.
Over the next two years we grew closer. We began by talking after class, then sitting together in it. We’d go for coffee together between lectures and write our essays side by side at the University computers. Superficially it may seem surprising that, with what I felt for her, nothing happened in those two years. But lacking the contrivances of an erotic fiction, nothing did. Both she and I were quite shy.
Celestine had had few boyfriends, her beauty putting some men off and her lack of awareness of said beauty colouring her impressions of what the men who asked her to accompany them to dinners and movies wanted. Perhaps she wondered if some malicious acquaintance had spread rumours that she was easy and that made her colder on her few dates than she would otherwise have been.
As for myself, my tendency to set the woman I truly felt something for upon unassailable pedestals meant I had as few serious relationships in my past as Celestine. I am reasonably attractive: quite tall and well built, the muscles of my limbs move sleekly beneath my clothes and my face is quite handsome, my best feature being perhaps my grey blue eyes. In my first two years of study I was pragmatic and, like all young men, in a state of near constant horniness - the mere sight of a smooth swell of breast in a low cut top, or a dance of nipple beneath sheer fabric, or the firm curve of an ass cupped in tight jeans, or a thousand other minor erotic flutters was enough to send the blood raging to my cock. But these encounters were either short affairs - a few nights after a drunken seduction in a club - or of maximum duration a few weeks, when, perhaps out of loneliness or convenience, I would seduce some girl whom, though I did not love, I did not tire of as quickly as my one night stands.
So she had never asked a boy out and I could never approach my Goddess with so coarse a request as “Hey Celestine, you feel like having dinner with me tonight?”
We knew, though, what we felt for each other. It was there in the way my voice thickened when I spoke about her. In the way she would look up when I entered a room and smile… no, not smile but
beam
. She lit up the room then with her beauty. But we lacked the confidence to articulate what our behaviour conveyed so clearly.
Our friends saw it too. Initially I could sense mine’s bafflement that I didn’t ask Celestine out, and hers anger at the way I appeared to be leading her on. For them understanding came quickly - this slow romance would not end with a wedding or a storm, but with a quiet parting.
Time, too, became an obstacle. As we spent more time together, our friendship became a barrier to anything more intimate, as the plain walls of familiarity present too concrete a form for the mystery and shadow of passion.
It is no coincidence that sand is associated with both sleep, as the Sandman, and the passage of time, as in an hourglass. For we pass our lives in dream, seldom conscious for the decisions we make at every moment, our knowledge of consequence hazy as fever. And as when sleeping, some cataclysm must awake us, so our world must be shattered before we realise that with every moment that passes we have one less opportunity to seize that which may make our lives whole.
Revelation came for me in the University café two weeks before graduation, sitting on a couch frayed by time and stained by neglect. Celestine leant against me, sucking the last juice from a carton of Ribena with a lack of sexual awareness bred by long familiarity. I was lifting a bottle of Pepsi to my lips but I paused. I could feel Celestine’s body against my right arm. The soft curve of her left breast pressing innocently against me. Her delicate thighs and calves brushing my plainer legs. The light floral scent of her shampoo and the stronger, sweeter smell of her body wash but beneath that the rawer, sensual smell of her body, for which a thousand metaphors suggest themselves but none truly fit. It was the smell of her sacred flesh.
And I realised that in two weeks, I would never see her again.
Hilariously, bitterly, like laughing until acid tears burned your eyes and scarred their way down your face, now my silence was not through hesitance or friendship but through lack of inspiration. What words could I summon to my cause? What could I possibly say? “I love you and we’re going our separate ways in two weeks.”
My silence persisted until the day of graduation, bleakly shading my days and my relationships. Inadequate words swelled in my throat, choking me, when I was around Celestine. In my larynx they built, growing until, at last, at the graduation ball, they finally sprung free.
Celestine and I were at the same table. She wore a simple green gown that flattered her figure by showing how little help it needed to stun anybody. Or perhaps I’m biased. I was hypnotised by her, her dark eyes like cooling lava, her skin pale and flawless, her hair liquid darkness. The words came. I got up, grabbed her and took her outside.
The moon was new, perhaps, I thought, signalling a new beginning in my relationship with Celestine. The dark was almost complete, dark enough that even Celestine’s radiance could not dispel it. For this I was grateful - if I had to watch her reaction as I spoke, I might freeze again. Above us, the stars’ flickering white light speckled through the cloud haze and blessed us.
“Celestine, there’s something I need to say.” She went to say something, but looking at me fell silent. “Since the moment I met you, I’ve loved you. I couldn’t say anything before. Ironic - a literature student not being able to find the words. But over the last few weeks, realising I was going to lose you… and then tonight. Looking at you tonight, I knew if I didn’t tell you how I felt, I would regret it forever.”
I looked her in the eyes, and forced the emotion out of my voice until I could say, with ringing clarity, “Celestine, I love you.”
The light of the stars glinted in the moisture of her eyes. “Oh Roland, I…I feel the same way. I was just so afraid to spoil what we had… I didn’t know you felt the same way.”
I gently brushed the tears from her eyes. She recovered and looked back at me calmly.
“So what now?” I asked.
“We go back inside, Roland, and finish our first date.”
“Our last date.”
