The Totality of Love

Constance was on the look out for an instance of Total Love to gift the Blue Knight who had discovered an emptiness.

Golden slumbers are one thing, a way back home, quite another.

Constance made research of the available material but could find no love in amusing romantic films or paintings of sheep. She plumbed the depths of literature, including instruction manuals and cookbooks. Inside the words there hid some sparks and inkling of love, but not near sufficient for Constance. She attended extended director’s cuts of fine soliloquies and west end productions, sifting the paragraphs with a fine mesh and shaking loose the emotions caught there in her net. Storing them in boxes of ice for freshness before shipping out in containers.

At evening she watched all the available channels whilst recording some extant. Catch up on tennis player. At bedtime, she went to sleep beside a stack of audio books that might soak through her conscience. After coffee, she spoke with the generations new and redundant, she recorded the gaps between their speech, forming these into structures where emotions might hide.

 At lunch time she sat with the old gentlemen in the backgammon cafe and asked of them leading questions which they refused to answer and laughed. In the afternoon, after a nap, she elicited vox pops on the street, lassoing passing to extract an opinion against their instinct. In the evening when the sky darkens and the electric lights grow yellow, Constance held court in a dozen ale houses and prime time tea shops, always listening, always polite, always fair, always lead to Rome, every way is up, way down yonder, way up high. Always wearing socks in winter and long shorts in the heat of. At night, during those darkening times, she read between the lines and threw a grass blade in the wind, shook the dice. She shuffled the pack, in an attempt to rustle out the necessary. But all to no avail, only receiving a skinned ankle, some veiled threats, and a hangover.

I cannot find the Totality of Love, thought Constance, thus, I shall discover what love is not, to narrow it all down.

She looked up at the sky where the leaves float up and birds plummet down, in the sea where all comes to nought. In the sea where imagination is absorbed by the endless and no other thought is possible, no love there then. Constance looked around the corner and raised her head above the parakeet. A bullet whizzes by in a bib and tucker. Constance ducks, legs only visible above the weed, bill in the wallet. Keep your head down under the radar, camouflage notwithstanding, ambush full of ripe fruit where the plummeting birds congregate. Which side are you on? This side or that side of the street? Straight on or next left, go past the bakery and don’t stop for a patisserie. Double expresso for me please, I’ll watch the world go by to pot some homemade jam, apricot for choice, reduced sugar, high in propane, intriguing to the palette.

Love ticks like a cooling engine, a petrol motor from before electric. Love thumps like a galloping horse, earth sods flying. Love screams like a diving fighter jet, vapour trail dissipating. Love annoys like a feather in your ear, stop it.

When she returned, empty and dejection, she went to her partner Vivainne with sadness in her throat and eye. Vivainne took her hand and did not speak. It was then a lightning bolt of love played through her entire.

There it is! She cried and tied it up with a bow to place in the Blue Knight’s empty box.