Yellow

I am sorry.  I am sorry that I did not find you sooner.

Say you will forgive me?

It has been ten years.  Ten years, and I have never stopped searching for you.  You are not surprised, of course not.  You must have known I was coming, all along.  I would never desert you, never give up.

Do you remember the night we met?  The stars, ah, all the stars in the sky were clear and bright, and you stood there on the terrace looking up at them.  That’s when I first saw you, your head tilted back, your bright yellow hair spilling down as your face bathed in the glow of the torchlight.  But it was not the torches that lit your eyes, it was the stars.

I thought you were beautiful, but I did not yet love you, then.

I could not have loved you if you had been just another pretty girl with golden hair, staring dreamily at the stars.  You were so much more than that.  The kindest, the sweetest, the smartest, the bravest. . . .  You would protest at all these things, as if you were not so very special.  Not nearly as special as I thought you to be.  But you were.  You are.  You will always be.

Still, when I see you now, I see you with the stars in your eyes.  Your hair, falling back, lit in the deep yellow of the torchlight.  Like that first time, before I knew you, when you caught my eye.  Another pretty girl.

Do you remember when I first told you that I loved you?  It was in a song.  I wrote a song for you, and only you.  You didn’t know that it was yours, you thought it was a song like all the others.  A song for everyone.  Until I told you that all my songs, from then on, would be for you.

I haven’t written any songs since I lost you.  I have done nothing but search.  I’ve climbed mountains, swam seas, fought battles.  I have.  I have bled for you.  I have sold my last possession and gone without food or drink, but I have never stopped searching.

Did you ever doubt me?  You knew that I loved you, didn’t you?  You knew that I would find you?

Come, let me unloose these chains.  What monsters men are, to ever dream of putting you in chains.  What thing, masquerading as human, would lock you in so dark a dungeon, so far away from the light of the sun and the stars?  Didn’t they realize?  Couldn’t they see?  That you were the kindest, the sweetest, the smartest, the bravest, the most beautiful . . . .

I will carry you from this dark, putrid place.  You have no worries, now; you’re safe, I’m here.  Not so very far away it is a beautiful night.  You’ll see.

Remember that night we first met?  I asked what you were thinking as you gazed into the sky, and you laughed, self-consciously, looking down.  A yellow lock fell in front of your face.  You said, “I was thinking how happy I am this night, and how it almost seems as if the stars are shining for me.”

Now, here we are, outside again at last.  Look at the stars, see how they shine?  They are shining for you.  They never stopped shining, shining on, all these years, even though you couldn’t see them.

And now, your trial is over.  I swore to find you and free you, so I will free you now.  Under the stars, where you can see them shining, I will build for you a queenly pyre, in the tradition of your fathers and mothers before you.  I will send you home in a blaze of yellow, like the torches that night.  Like your hair once was.  Your skin and bones will become beautiful again, not this rotted corpse they have made you into.  You will be carried away into the air, up to the stars.  They are waiting for you.

I love you so.

You know that I love you so.

Footnote

Inspired by this picture and this song.