they’re in each other all along

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There is a story about the Greek gods: they were bored so they invented human beings. But they were still bored so they invented love. Then they weren’t bored any longer. So they decided to try love for themselves.

That’s when they invented laughter… so they could stand it.

Mr. Kelly called me today for the first time in a while and I sat down in the sand and stared out at the ocean and listened to the familiarity of the old man’s voice. He was resting in the bed of his new nursing home and I sat on the beach more than nine hours away from home, but it felt comfortable and so we chatted like usual, both of us seemingly unaware of our distance.

“I miss you,” he told me, “Tell me about the beach, I want to feel the sand, smell the ocean. Is it lovely?”

It’s beautiful here, I told him and looked out into the water through the strands of hair that blew across my face. It was still early spring, not quite warm enough for the oil-shined sun bathers who sprawled out on towels just down the beach from me. “I can’t think of a place quite as pretty as the ocean in the spring.”

“Makes you want to fall in love,” he said more as a statement than as a question and his words seemed to linger in the phone and I could almost see him sitting in his chair, staring out the tiny window of his old apartment and thinking about a love he’d once had and lost. “I once walked down the beach with a woman I loved,” he continued. “There’s no moment quite so special.”

Several couples dotted the beach around me. Some held hands and walked along the shore, others filled buckets with sand and made castles. One pair, barely close enough to see, kissed as the waves tickled their ankles and receded again into the ocean.

“She was special wasn’t she?” I asked and wondered how much he’d tell me about the great love of his life he barely spoke of.

Silence echoed from the other end of the phone and the breeze from the water and the sound of the seagulls was all I could hear.

“She was more beautiful than I will ever be able to tell you,” he said so quietly I had to cover my other ear to hear him. “I didn’t love her as a rose of salt, topaz or arrow of carnations that propagate fire. I loved her as one loves certain dark things, secretly, between the shadow of the soul.”

She was a lover. A mistress. Someone he barely spoke of out of shame, of guilt even, but mostly out of longing for the one thing he always would regret: not following his heart.

I knew very little about the romance, only that it was brief and passionate and unlike anything he’d ever experienced or ever would experience again. But he’d left her and married his fiance, the respectable thing to do, and he never saw the woman again.

“Do you ever wish you’d done something different,” I asked him to break our silence. I stared out at the couples that romanced along the beach and wondered about Mr. Kelly’s great love. “Do you ever wish you could go back and stay with her, that you could have a life of true love and passion.”

No, he said and that was all he would say.

“What about the rest of your life?” I insisted. “How could you love your wife knowing you’d given your heart to another?”

He only laughed then and said, “I learned to laugh. My wife and I laughed together and happiness took the place of passion. And love eventually took the place of happiness.”

I smiled then and it seemed strange to me how love and habit blurred so thoroughly to make a life.

“I feel love here,” I told him and I did. It seemed love surrounded me on the beach. “I wonder how many of these people found each other on this beach.”

“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere,” Mr. Kelly said quoting Rumi. “They’re in each other all along.”

I laughed then because he couldn’t see me smile and he returned the emotion. “And that laughter,” he said. “That’s what makes the love worth it.”

That’s when they invented laughter… maybe instead it was to understand love.

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