The Book of Angelina by Patrick Sean Lee (best memoirs of all time .TXT) 📖

                           THE BOOK OF ANGELINA


The Roosevelt Lodge, high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains-December 4, 2010

                                       ***

The sun is as bright as the insides of a white-hot blast furnace this morning, but it is a frozen brightness. Outside my window the long eaves of the roof seem to be smoldering as their breathy vapors leave and stream upward, urged off the foot-thick blanket of snow covering the steep roof. Droplets of water escape through the underside; the snow is melting from the inside out, as am I. Here in the room the stale, pungent air is radiant-heated by the window glass, but out there on the other side the temperature is barely above the freezing mark. It is my twentieth day here at the lodge, seven of them without her.

Isabella told me to begin the book again that morning she left, the book I’d begun six months ago. The book that was languishing in failure and would certainly end my career. I'd left the city to resurrect and finish it in the solitude of these mountains, here at this lodge. I have instead placed it aside and begun another, forced onto the screen before me by my heart and the cruel loneliness possessing it in her absence.

With her face floating in and out of my mind’s vision, I placed my fingers on the keys and began last week. A beginning following a simple ‘The…’ that I did not despair of and erase.

Oh, it is a fact. Writing is not inspiration or emotion; it isn’t driven by flashes of genius or sudden insights. It is work, and the only way to accomplish the end is to sit down and do the beginning. Look at the screen, put my fingers on the keyboard, and begin to type. By some miracle, if I can discipline myself to do only this, I will by the end of this session have another five, perhaps ten pages, and they might even, by some other miracle, be very good.

I am listening to music this morning as I write—a requiem by a man named Jenkins, and my fingers seem to follow every note as though they were the letters of sacred words.

I am writing. Sixty pages as of last night at midnight.

I am writing again, for Isabella.


From: THE BOOK OF ANGELINA

In Paradisum.

I float on the wings of music; on a ballet of staccato strings, pings of a harp, and a chorale of exquisite soprano voices—tenors and baritones, and rich basses.

I dream that God has taken hold of my hand and flown with me across a land of green meadows, of streams and woodlands, and to mountains so high that ascending them hand in hand with Him, my breath leaves me. Rushing upward we leave my earth, my home, bound for heaven.

The voices, I discover, so far away from where we started, are Him. The violins and the harp are part of His soul that is so lovely I cannot do without hearing it. Again and again it emanates like suns and clouds and planets—omniscient peace. It is absolute rest. A moving rest that is not an agent of reinvigoration but invigoration itself.

In my dream God is a melody, with mists of robes and a face that never frowns. In my dream He has an ancient white beard that is buffeted by the starry winds of notes we sail through, and His eyes are diamonds and still pools of blackness, like space itself. They draw me, and hold me as surely as His strong, infinite hand.

“She is waiting,” He says, and we soar through endless space and dimensions of time.

I am wonderfully warm, and I wonder if I’ve died. I laugh at myself and realize that I have not because I feel my feet and my toes, and I know ghosts do not have feet.

In my dream God extends His arms outward like mighty wings, and at the end of His right hand I am suddenly shot through the dust of planets, the gas of stars a trillion light years beyond Him. Oh, and the music heightens as though every atom in the universe becomes a part of His glorious symphony as we pass by! I am smiling and unafraid, now…and looking across the cosmic ocean of His body I see Angelina in His other hand. Her sparkling jet hair, so far away, courses behind her and throws pricks of dazzling light upward and outward, like stellar fireworks, like stars being born. She turns her head and smiles at me, and I am gloriously happy.

In my dream I use the power of celestial strings and the choir voices as my pen, writing with them on comets that stream in endless arcs to hesitate momentarily in the void at my fingertips. I move my free hand in its own arc and watch as melody transformed into script imprints on them, and then one after another they whisk away, across their Creator’s beautiful face to Angelina.

In my dream Angelina longs for me, wants to fly across the space dividing us and join my soul. I believe in her love, as surely as I believe in this God whose hand holds me.

And finally… in my dream there is no hell, nor are there demons or condemnation, only a contentment and the sure knowledge that as I sail through this dimension given to me, I am safe and cared for. I join the chorus, and I am filled with joy. My words are stars. My stars are Angelina, and she is singing, too. We have found each other again, and we are going home.

                                                ***

I awaken and feel the hand and fingers of Angelina in my hand, and excitement grips me; my heart races for the split second it takes for me to realize she is not beside me. The sensation of her warm hand lingers, though, an afterimage, the clinging of the subconscious to things that are buried deep inside. I turn my head on the pillow in a useless gesture to make certain I am not mistaken, knowing, of course, that I am back in solid, distressing reality. God has gone home and left me here, and Angelina has also disappeared. I was safe in the dream, but now I am only in a home of brick and mortar, floating away from her, dying inside. Such are the endings of dreams. Vain hopes, and the refusal of the mind to follow the death of the heart and soul.

Since returning to the parish, she has haunted my thoughts. I rise and dress and leave the rectory every morning to say Mass, but I feel the overwhelming shroud of loneliness that covers me. My lips perform the duty solemnly, without error, and also without reverence.

It is Saturday morning and a winter blizzard that rushed over the front range like a horde of invaders yesterday afternoon continues. Wild winds hurling shards of ice rise violently, subside, then begin the attack again. The pavement of the street in front of the church is black, still, because the ice has no cleft or ridge to cling to, and so the bitter, frozen snow piles up against the edge of the gutter instead, growing at the whim of the wind, beaten down again and again as chunks of it are ripped free and taken along to other barriers. I raise the collar of my winter overcoat up to cover the exposed side of my face, bend forward and to the left against the gale, and hop-run to the rear sanctuary door. I will say mid-morning Mass, visit Mr. Hernandez who is dying of liver cancer afterward, then return to the warmth of the rectory. This afternoon Father Gregory and I will hear confessions, if any parishioner penitent enough to brave the fury of the storm comes to the cathedral.

Though we priests cannot forgive a sin we are party to, Angelina confessed to me anyway. Asked my forgiveness for our sin. I didn’t know how to absolve her. Absolve her of what? That day I sat across the desk in my office watching her cry, certain in her heart that we’d committed some sin beyond adultery—and I suppose we had; we parted. I dutifully made the sign of the cross with my hand and whispered as I held back my own tears, “Ego te absolvo de peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris…”.

I watched her leave quietly, not looking back, her sad, radiant head bent forward. I struggled to speak. “Goodbye, Angelina. I will always…” She raised her hand as she descended the steps, as though casting a backward blessing, but I knew it was really her plea for me not to finish. I could see that she was still crying.

I haven’t seen her since, and I want badly to leave this earth.

                                      ***

And so, I continue to write, my heart and soul far away in Isabella’s grasp. Whether her hands are gentle, wishing to resurrect me from this Purgatory I exist in by her return, or cruel and crushing, frozen, unmoving, like the glaciers outside on the peaks, I cannot say. But this I do know. Should I never write another book—another page in fact—she will know, in time, that I have pulled the best of me, the best I have, from the mire and confusion I dwelt in before she entered my life.

Oh, it was so brief. All too brief. But it was the birth of me, finally, and how I miss her today. Again.

I am writing again.

I am writing. Maybe for the first time in my life.

Text: (c) Patrick Sean Lee, 2010
Images: Cover courtesy of Laz
Publication Date: 12-14-2010

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
So many thanks to Laz for creating the cover.