UNTIL THE DEEP WATER STILLS

 

REFLECTIONS

I met a spirited old lady from across the lake today. Her name is Agnes but they call her the “Reflection Lady”. She sees images – which no one else can decipher – in light reflections on the water and takes pictures of them. The locals think she’s daft but I find her quite charming. So my journal theme for today is reflections.

   

The wedding dream must be a reflection of my scattered emotions. Dreams are, after all, fragments of life cobbled together to warn us something is going to happen. Easy enough to see what it’s telling me at the surface level. But there’s a deeper meaning I can’t decode. Maybe something to do with those retro moments with Jayce.

 

They happen just when I think there’s nothing left between us. He brushes a bit of hair away from my face or puts his arms around me from behind and rests his chin on my head. Suddenly I’m wildly in love with him all over again. For a few minutes I’m living in the reflection of the good years of our marriage.  

 

 

If I wasn’t 150 miles from the city I’d call up Nicholas and have him sit for another portrait to capture that joy before it evaporates. He has an uncanny ability to strike just exactly the right pose. I plucked him out of the Fine Arts Department at York University. Quite a find – a blond-haired, blue-eyed Adonis with a boy-next-door innocence.

 

When I started that project a year ago it was going to be a short portrait series. Just variations on a theme. But it took on a life of its own that I wasn’t expecting.  I didn’t tell Jayce simply because of the expense. He would have thought it was frivolous.

 

But now it’s this intensely private thing that I don’t want to share. I plant my emotions in Nicholas and he mirrors them back to me. I just can’t bring myself to give him up.

 

 

 

There’s nothing going on – not that he hasn’t tested the waters – but I can’t deny that there’s something obliquely sexual about it. Could it be that I make him into a surrogate for what Jayce once was to me but stopped being for no good reason?

Dangerous hypotheses like that are why I’m sitting on this dock with all the yesterdays staring back at me from the water like time reflections. Reflection Lady – what do you see in this magic mirror? Is the ticking clock in my heart finally reaching midnight?