So This Is Love

It was England I believe, but perhaps Ireland. After years of travel, the certainties of memory become obscured behind the present. I can’t remember the name of the museum or the artist, not even a single painting we saw. What I do remember, what I’ll always remember, was the couple we passed as we were leaving.

I couldn’t tell at first. They had their backs to us and were looking at some grand masterpiece on the wall. She was whispering softly to him, her wrinkled arm intertwined with his, her elderly lips pressed against his ear, breathing warmly the words of art and paint and love.

In the arm not connected with hers, he held a cane. I remember thinking how fragile he seemed, propped up between a cane and a woman, as though one unassuming gust of wind would send them tumbling like a house made of cards. And still they moved together with such ease, this serene creature on its five diminutive legs, that one could hardly dare to feel anything but peaceful and stable in its presence. Together they glided through the silent room.

They turned slowly towards us, and I found myself face to face with a pair of listless eyes. It took me a moment to realize he was blind. Blind in a museum. One of the universe’s cruel jokes on man, to place him in a world filled with colors and delicate brush strokes and intricate shapes and prevent him from seeing any of it.

But the universe has its way of correcting its mistakes. For his eyes, it sent him this woman, to be his eyes, to walk through a museum with him and whisper into his ear the things he could not see, to fill his heart with sight.

I wondered if he had always been blind. I wondered if he had ever seen anything in his life. I wondered if her descriptions of the blues and pinks and oranges meant anything, or whether they were just words whose significance he had to imagine. I wondered why he agreed to come to a museum, whether it was his idea, whether he had requested it simply to spend an afternoon with her mouth pressed so tenderly to his ear. I wondered why it all made such perfect sense.

That was the first time I remember seeing love. I mean, REALLY seeing it. Standing before me was a testament of patience, sacrifice, compromise and kindness. Standing before me was a couple who didn’t need sight, or the ability to walk with ease, or the fervor of youth to make their hearts sing. Standing before me was the secret of love, and although I had never truly seen it before, I seemed to recognize it instantly. So this is love, I thought.

Love. Long after your senses have left you and your skin has withered. Long after your days of running and dancing through the fields have gone. Long after the relationships you knew would last forever have faded into old pictures and letters tucked away in your memory chest, your heart still thrives for it, on it. Because it is love that keeps us going, and love that makes us want to stay. It is love that all of us wake up for each morning in the hopes of finding, and keeping, and cherishing. It is love that spurs us on.

And the blind man knew that, and placed it in a museum, so that the rest of us could come and look. And know. And see.