The Bells

Of course she would meet him in a Library. There was something about the scent of age and knowledge of that particular library she found appealing. She would always think of him when she got that scent, when she felt the crispness of an autumn evening.

It had been a strangely happy time in her life- she was successfully in a post she enjoyed, she like the home she had been in for a year. She filled her life with music. It seemed the hard years were behind her.

The first sight of him beguiled her. Of course he was a Piscean, of course. She somehow had this very specific type- handsome moody Piscean with dark eyes and dark hair. He even had a connection to Abbey Road!

She would make her weekly pilgrimage to share his Sunday morning with him. Sometimes she made the same journey mid-week (she recalled the train broke down once- that had been a long journey home). It made it seem like something even more sacred and worthwhile to be with him to have to make that journey, to travel to a place she never knew before so often. She heard the bells calling her

He had visited her once at her home, just before Valentines Day. She would never forget seeing him at the bottom of the stairs at her work on Valentines day itself. He never looked more like a puppy. How she hugged him. Did her hear the bells too? Did they call him to her?

She never thought she would find so many things about herself answered in him. How much he echoed her experiences. She had found it so hard to relate to men. She was often scared of them but he had been such an exception. He seemed so gentle and thoughtful.

She remembered the blossoms were all out that Good Friday. He was like Spring. He was a gentle warmth in her heart, a blooming of sleeping flowers. Those particular spring blossoms would die forever never to bloom again after him.

An Easter kiss turned so cold by Pentecost. 49 days . Not long. Of course things began to go wrong in May. It had always been a strangely painful month the last few years. It always took something when it left. This time it would take him.

That Pentecost something died in her, never to be reborn. She would never forget how she felt when he uttered those words. It is was like she had physically been switched off.

How she regretted how angry her pain and loneliness had made her toward him, the angry words she told him. But what she felt was like an energy that needed to turn itself somewhere. She did not like how bitter she had been. She learnt the danger of making another human the focus of her happiness.

If she learnt one thing, it was that she understood what it meant to actually be in love. It had not been the childish crush she mistook for real feelings before. It had not been some immature bedazzling. She had learnt that she did have the ability to love and give another person that way. She may never feel that way again but she had at least felt that way once.

In the year after him, she made some effort to try and see if she could date other men. She even went on a couple of dates that came to nothing. But he was the true image. It only reminded her that no other man could ever occupy that part in her heart. He had been a rare exception, her one in a million. She realised that men held no real attraction for her. It had taken one that she had felt exceptional to even call her out of her solitude. She was not prepared to settle. The severance from him had almost killed her. But she did not regret anything about what she had learnt by the experience.

Perhaps she directed what she had felt for him into her love for the city she had spent part of her childhood in. The spring blossoms never stopped blooming there.

In the years after him, she learnt a lot about standing up as her own women. She would never be able to believe the things she believed when she was with him. If anything, his behaviour proved the points of the feminists she would follow. There would be no more Easter blossoms. No more worship of dead times and dead men. Her reborn life would have to affirm life, to affirm the beautiful now. She would learn to be a proud spinster. A wise hag helped her see the beauty of that term .

She thought about that song she used to listen to when travelling home from visiting him on Sunday – ‘I’ll never hear the bells again’ . Well she never would. But she would hear the call of solidarity with other women

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCLZxiu9SyE