What Once Was Pales Before What Could Be

Brother Pablo and I are engaged in a heated discussion about choices and what he thinks I ought to have done but I am unmoving because I do not believe he understands me.

We argue in two different languages switching back and forth between them with no awareness of how strange it appears to others who describe us as speaking in tongues.

He tells me I should not hold any anger or disappointment about choices made in the past and throws a quote at me as proof of his position,.

“I am not jealous
of what came before me.

Come with a man
on your shoulders,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,
come like a river
full of drowned men
which flows down to the wild sea,
to the eternal surf, to Time!

Bring them all
to where I am waiting for you;
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be you and I
alone on earth,
to start our life!”
― Pablo Neruda

What Once Was Pales Before What Could Be

The neighbors say I was so loud and forceful in my declaration people two streets over heard me but I cannot say whether this is truth or exaggeration.

Instead I can only swear fealty to my belief that as good things were they pale against the potential for what could be.

Brother Pablo asks if I can prove this and I ask him to show me physical proof of love.

“You could tell me any woman that bore your baby showed proof of love and I would say that isn’t proof that she loved you and that it might not be proof that she loved the baby she bore either. Nature doesn’t always work as we expect, anticipate or think it ought to.”

We battle he and I and still refuse to budge.

“There is no substitute for life experience and that experience is what gives me confidence that what once was pales before what could be.”

He asks me how I can believe what can not be proved without living and I laugh.

“Life is pain and life is joy with degrees of separation in between. In this situation I say if the parties went in with the right intent all could work.

Why?

Because I know things and that which I know isn’t based upon science but the sort of magic I know you know about because you have lived it.

It is only those who have not doubt it because once you have been inside the secret garden you know.”

No Longer Dormant

“Speak with me now Pablo because tomorrow I will enter hell and it will be of my own device.”

“I thought you were already in hell?”

“Yes, I am but this is a different sort, this is the physical. What I have eaten will try to kill me tomorrow and I will curse myself for having been so foolish.”

“So you punish yourself again for that which you couldn’t control and for the inability to see the future. You are not a soothsayer.”

“No, but I know things in more than one are and in this one I was blind and that requires penance. Something click inside and it is no longer dormant.”