"Forever You Will Be Mine"

“Forever you will be mine” she said to me, and of course I did not believe her. She was a romantic and so was I, and such words habitually dripped out of her lovely mouth like honey from the comb, in a never-ending flow of flattery which I am ashamed to say I wallowed in. She was a gal who lived by the sea, and her words often had the same method of ebb and flow, and come and go. I loved her passionately for her soul, the desire she had for me which I saw in those sea-blue eyes of hers, and with what I considered a healthy lust for the body of a lovely and voluptuous young woman.

She remained a mystery to me; I did not understand why she was so vague with her answers to my many questions, and I had to admit that it was just one more thing that I found so positively alluring about her. She had a breathy way of speaking, wisdom beyond her years (she was young, judging by her face barely over thirty) and a manner of speaking that made her words ring like the lines of a poetess. She framed nearly all of them in questions that were purely rhetorical: it was not an answer she was searching for, but something else.

“Forever will I wait for you,” I said to her in return, and I think about these things now, as I bring the incident to mind, the incident that changed my life, the incident when those words rolled out of her mouth like a wave out of the ocean, from her lilting tongue and her sensuous lips. I know now that the words rolled out of my mouth before I thought of them. It just seemed like the right thing to say in response, but I know I did not frame them. They came out of my mouth before they formed in my brain. Such was often her effect on me.

I have had designs and fancies and fantasies for many girls and women over the course of my life, but none could really hold me long. Their eyes masked insincerity; they wanted something from me perhaps, but it was not me they were looking for. With her the same was true—I had no idea what she wanted from me but I am not stupid and I knew that this entrancing, bewitching beauty certainly had no need for me; she had her pick of whomever she wanted. When she uttered those words I could not help but fall head-over-heels for this statuesque, chestnut-haired beauty. She was almost half my age and for the first time I knew that it did not matter that she seemed ageless in spite of her youth; I took her words into my heart like a drowning man clutching at every floating thing in view, and I drove myself into insanity every moment she was not there by my side. I feel certain she wanted it that way.

There was that morning I walked with her by the shore, listening to the waves crashing in with the powerful force of the tidal pull, hearing the seagull's crying, smelling the briny air, and enjoying every second of every step along the way, just entranced because she was walking next to me. In that moment when I yearned for her most passionately—so much I could have wept if I was not terrified my tears would drive her away—it happened, and it was not a second, it was a moment lasting for nearly a minute that I will never forget. A wave crashed, a gull screeched, and then she told me.

In that moment when I pined for her because of the desperate panting I heard in her soft words she spoke, I saw through her, and I do not mean that figuratively, I mean that quite literally … I saw through her. The sun shone over the horizon as she walked along, a gull flew over the waves of the sea, and all of this came through her … shone and flew and crashed right through her. I did not stop to take in what it meant; but it was not rhetorical or figurative; it was literal, and an unquestioned truth: “Forever you will be mine,” she told me.

“Forever will I wait for you,” I said to her in return, and the words came out of my mouth before I had time to think of them. She was not there anymore; she was but a silhouette, a transparent image of a woman walking next to me, her bare feet with their lovely blue-lacquered nails leaving impressions in the sand of the shore although she was invisible.

She was invisible save for her lovely sea-blue eyes, which looked into my heart and my soul, and knew my passionate yearning for her; for her femininity, her smoothness, her roundness, her soft and gentle hands that occasionally caressed me, and her hair that blew about in the ocean breeze which I could not see with my eyes but saw with my mind. In that moment I thought about what I had said, and I know now that her words to me and then mine to her were not passionate words of love, but rather a commitment, and an acknowledgement, and a commandment. In that moment, and forever afterward, she owned me, and it did not matter to me that she was just a romantic and I assumed she was speaking from her heart out of the passion of the moment. In that moment I could not remember where I had met her—I still can't. It seems I've forgotten, and haven't been able to recall ever since she said that. I believed her then, because I understood the implication: I would never be able to escape, because I would never want to. There was just no reason to. No one else would be able to hold me in her grasp with the magic she had. Did I have a choice when this stunning beauty walked beside me on the shore, and she was mine just as much as I was hers? She faded back into my view then, every inch the woman I had known before, and although I still could not recall how she had come into my life, it did not seem to matter, because by then I was convinced that there really had been no life for me before I knew her, so why drag my conscious mind backward to that which meant nothing to me? She possessed me and I was her willing possession. She would not have to grasp after me, she only needed to look at me, and with one glance into those all-consuming eyes I knew that I was hers; forever I would be hers …

So now there is no future, and no past; I walk along the shores every morning, and every evening, and eventually she is there with me. She grasps my hand into hers and leads me along the lapping waves of the sea, and why would I want anything else? I do not have to remember anything, and only know what she told me. She did not ask me to follow her, she told me that I was her eternal possession and I wanted to be such.

I walk with her there, and there is no reason to reflect on anything but that moment when she spoke and then faded away into the living panorama surrounding us. I would relive this moment forever, the greatest moment of my life, and never would it end—she would always be there and so would I. I can hear her soft feet sloshing in the wet sand, feel her hand in mine, see the seagull flying behind her, the sun dropping below the eternally wet horizon, the warm ocean breeze blowing her fragrantly-scented hair around us, the scent of brine in the air as intoxicating as the perfume in her hair, the crashing of waves roaring in our ears, the reflection of the golden sun upon the deep aqua green sea looking like rolling waves of burnished emerald …