Angels' Dares (Volume 2, Part 2)

You can read the earlier installments series...

Volume 1, in New York City, USA
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Volume 2, in Florence, Italy
Part 1

Or pick up here, with the characters outside the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.
*****

My hand to his cheek, our eyes to the sky, we remain silent in the Tuscan sun. Silent, but not quiet. Never are we quiet, most especially when we lack words.

He is weary of mortality. I feel it in the never-ceasing rhythm of his thoughts. He grows tired of the idea of it--the toll of so much psychic energy spent, for what? Youth thrashes upon unconquerable battlefields; age recognizes wisdom in roots. He sees this now. Desiring roots, still he struggles silently--something astray, some part of him sensing disjunction, sounding panic in violent choppy waves that rush and batter my shore. On the outside, we are placid.

In this place, I do not wonder why he will not speak. I only know that he needs a guide. Here in her city, I can be Beatrice. Yet also am I Virgil. Exhausted with the weight of his own survival, solely responsible far too long, he wishes his plight recognized with indicators implicit, even silent. First blinded in the sun, now muted in the shadow, he hopes but dares not believe. I merely continue receiving the semaphores. Someday he will see how he sent them. Or acknowledge, for already I believe he sees.

Once, I feared him--not his strengths, but the hollow of his searching, his potential for resignation, his aptitude for despair. Is climbing worth effort when irony promises further to fall? Yet where others see mere meltable snow atop summits, I see an infinitude of sparkling joy--resplendent even in scattered impurity. And him... he sees the light dance, too. Siblings in pain, lovers in optimism: I feared him only as I feared myself.

And so...

Speaking—or not speaking—of the pinpricks of mundanity: what is that, compared to company in the vast home of spirit, next to omnipresence in the heart? Words become superfluous. Pressured, disappointed, insecure, we squabble, constrained as mortals are. But here we are ourselves. Here we are angels.

Subtle pressure from my fingers nudges his face down, brings his gaze to mine. With my open hand, I reach for his, slide my fingers down his waiting palm. Skin on skin, ever more contact, only now will I flutter the fingers off his face. Our hands entwined, I let a fingertip find the flesh that separates his thumb from four fingers, and rub and knead and soothe. I am here.

First I saw for him and now I speak. Now is the time of his rebirth. Though I'll not say it aloud. Angels speak epics in the imperceptible pulsations of distant stars.