“Come Cassandra, don’t be late! I can’t believe I’ve made it here before you!”
“It’s never been a race, Oscar!”
It was like being children again. Our hearts were joyful, our minds were trouble-free, as if all the hurts had been left in the past and a massive door had been locked behind them. I quickened my steps as you opened your arms, as if to make yourself, the target of my love arrows, even more visible.
A sibilant sound cut me short on my track. An unruly whirlwind pushed me to the ground. I don’t know if I fainted or it was really happening. The air was sparkly and orange. Then the sky turned black. I could see falling stars and meteors cross the vaults above me. The world was coming to an end. But you were with me and were now hugging me tight. That’s the last thing I remember. Wasn’t this a crazy, erratic lifetime anyway? One of finding you and losing you and finding you again? Love that kills, loves that brings you back to life. We melted into our desperate embrace. We belonged to that tarnished knowledge. Life around us started to disappear into a void.
We were all that was left: a man and a woman with no secrets between us. Complete revelation, total understanding, ensuing surrender. I belonged to you as much as you were mine. We couldn’t help it. It might have been biology, destiny, psychology, higher circumstances. We were and would always be a perfect match. If we were to look at our time together from any viewpoint in our lives, past and present, the best days were always those we spent in each other’s arms.
All of a sudden there was a big explosion. Then nothingness spread around like an ink stain. It swallowed us. We were no more. We had never existed. No Plan. No Shambhala. No Evolution. No Masters. No Twin Flames. No big love. No transformation. No wounds. No yearning. No Oscar and no Cassandra. Just the heavy black ink of forgetfulness, and ignorance that turned to bliss.
* * * *
Lord Lumiel and Lady Myriam closed the Gates of Shambhala behind them, forever. Mothership Shambhala would return to the Morning Star without them. They were the Rebel Twins headed for a parallel third dimension that would come into being once the White Island had disappeared from the Earth’s dimension. Exciting, challenging times lay ahead. The course of history would be forever changed by their disobedience. They welcomed the element of surprise.
* * * *
Replay: Tara, 21 March 2012
“Hi Oscar...”
The attractive middle aged woman in the beige Chanel dress placed her manicured hand on her lover’s cheek. A couple of days’ stubble made him even more handsome, she thought. He had made an effort and was not his usual shabby, if charming, self. New shoes and a silk burgundy shirt. She couldn’t wait to peel his clothes off, as soon as they would reach the comfort of the room she had booked in a nearby five-star hotel. She wanted to feel his body next to hers, and to offer her body to him like an oasis in the desert.
He was a divorced, failed artist. She was the unloved wife of an international golfer. They had a lot in common, not just the physical attraction that had brought them together. Like all the bonds that are formed in rehab, where Cassandra and Oscar had met a year previously, theirs was deep and life-changing.
“I’m glad you could make it, Cassie,” Oscar said. “I know the paps are always following you...”
He leaned over to kiss her. At last. Sex between them was finally a possible antidote for the previous sadness in their lives. Relationships between patients weren’t permitted in the clinic. They could not be intimate there: it would muddle their therapy. So Cassandra and Oscar had let their fondness for each other grow in silence. A stolen kiss from time to time, and greedy hands on skin would have to wait, they would make love when they were both free, back in the normal world.
Cassandra was discharged from rehab first, before Christmas the previous year. Twelve months had passed since her last half-baked attempt at taking her own life. She had never really meant to kill herself: it was only a cry for help. Oscar’s problem with addiction to drugs and alcohol was more deeply rooted. It had taken him a little longer to recover, but he had eventually left the clinic two months earlier and had now been clean for six months.
The time had come for them to meet under the sun, or almost. She was still married, technically speaking, and couldn’t afford to be caught having an affair with a penniless artist. Her husband’s new paternity suit would soon provide her with the grounds to leave their loveless marriage. But for now, money was important so she had to bite her lip for a little while longer.
Oscar didn’t quite share her concern with finances. He was a bit dippy, like most reformed hippies. He wasn’t the best of catches in economic terms, but he was very dashing, and as affectionate as a child. They had both recovered from life-long mental troubles and were no longer afraid of anything their psyches might throw their way. Not one single stone in their minds had been left unturned. At last they had faced, and banished, all fears and shame, and were letting reality do its healing.
Their lives had been no bed of roses. Both had secrets which had plagued their souls, fuelling their escapist tendencies. When Cassandra was seven, her mother had committed suicide. When she was eight, she had discovered that her father had also died, in a car crash, six months before her mother’s death. Cassandra had never really come to terms with the loss of her father, and had made up imaginary scenarios where he was still very much alive and the hero of her life.
Oscar’s troubles were even worse: he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was five and sent to be cured in a religious institution a year later. There, he was sexually abused, at the tender age of six.
They were in their forties when they had finally met. The one thing that they had in common was their separate decisions that enough was enough. They both resolved that they wanted to live; they wanted to love and they wanted to be loved. It had taken them both over four decades to realise that they were deserving of being healthy human beings. No need to run away with their minds anymore. No need to struggle to become something that they shouldn’t be.
In rehab, Oscar had accepted that he was never going to be a world-famous artist. His work was never going to change the lives of those who admired it; it could hardly change his own life after all. So he had resolved to turn his skill into a practical job, as an interior decorator, in order to finally afford paying alimony to Charlotte, his ex wife, and their child Morwana. He was ready to face up to reality: he was not going to run away to the hazy lands of cocaine and whiskey this time. He had been abused when he was a child, that’s true, but he had learned to accept his past and move on from it.
Cassandra had different issues to handle. She had always been a perfectionist who had pushed herself too hard. She had to prove to the world what she was capable of, like many adults who had been fostered as children. She had always felt different, perhaps slightly superior. She was beautiful and she had learned to use her charms on men for superficial advantage. She had married Gordon Stewart when she was twenty-five. Her marriage to him would guarantee her financial security for the rest of her life, despite the fact that they had never had any children.
But being married to a superstar came with lots of pressure, too. She had to remain as attractive and as young looking as she was when she had first spun her web around him. Bulimia and anorexia had punctuated her thirties, and her all-pervading fear of being abandoned again.
Gordon had never been faithful to her and had had many lovers. Two years earlier, however, she had discovered that he had another entire family, which he maintained alongside his marriage to her. And he had a son. When Cassandra found out, her whole life became devoid of meaning. That’s when she had taken an overdose of the barbiturates that had helped her to sleep over the years: she was tired and wanted the world to know. It was January 2010. The press had been on her case since. Gordon Stewart’s gorgeous wife was showing the cracks in her once-perfect life.
Cassandra and Oscar’s new life together would start that afternoon, in each other’s arms, lost in the
orgasms they had dreamed of for over a year. They would become two anonymous people blending into an ordinary world made of movies, dinners cooked together, walks in the country side, and long, sensual love-making. The future looked bright in its normality.
“Your face, Cassandra... I’ve always known it... when my eyes first caught a glimpse of you among the other patients... I knew you were the reason why I had ended up there...”
She put her index finger on his lips, to shush him, and then she winked.
“No more artistic nonsense, darling,” she said”, I’ve not come here to hear poetry: I want your body now. Your soul can wait.”
Their first intercourse, the offspring of a year of longing, took their bodies into long awaited rapture under the Fairy Tree on the Hill of Tara. Their moans mingled with the moos of cows in the surrounding pastures and the sound of distant church bells. They laughed like the children they had become again, and would always be. When you are hurt at a young age, your heart freezes in time, and doesn’t let your soul decay quickly. They knew it and respected each other’s emotional wounds each time they touched them. Their vulnerability would become their shield against the rest of the world.
“I love you, Cassandra.”
She shook her head and silenced him with a long kiss.
“Words aren’t necessary, artist, when actions speak louder...”
Cassandra pulled her skirt down and buttoned up her blouse, looking every inch a happy woman. Oscar grabbed her buttocks and smiled from ear to ear. A blue and red butterfly landed on the tree trunk that had witnessed their first physical merge. The two lovers didn’t pay it any heed, and the butterfly flew away, perhaps searching for someone else to accompany on a soul journey. These two were quite happy in this world of physicality. Heaven had at last stopped whispering in their ears. It had nothing else to add to their story, and now the Earth herself could finally exert her gentle rule in Cassandra and Oscar’s lives.
THE END?
End Note from Cassandra
Dear Friend, thank you for reading my story. I hope it was fuel for your imagination.
The finale you have just read is simply one of many possible scenarios.
I’d like you to IMAGINE how things could be if you were me. Would you take Oscar back? Would you like to change things at some other stage in the plot? Or would you come up with a very different outcome?
Perhaps you might like to jot down your imaginary ending on my webpage, www.cassandramorgante.com, in the specific section. Or you may prefer to keep it to yourself in your beautiful Star Heart.
What I wanted to say here is that there is really no end; there are just many different new beginnings. And I wanted you to know.
Love,
Cassie
PS: if you enjoyed reading my story, please leave a review of the book at:
http://pierasarasini.wix.com/pierasarasini#!your-feedback – I would greatly appreciate it!
About the Author
Piera Sarasini was born in Brescia, Italy and moved to the UK in 1987. She has lived in London, Edinburgh and Belfast. Educated at the Chartered Institute of Linguists, London, and the Queen's University, Belfast, Piera holds a Degree and Post Graduate Studies in Linguistics, Social Anthropology and Ethnomusicology. She moved to Ireland in 2000 and currently lives in Dublin.
For the past 20 years she has been working as a Chartered linguist, in-company Italian language instructor, professional literary and medical translator and Goddess Sessions Facilitator. She has lectured in anthropology, ethnomusicology and visual studies at Queen's University, Belfast, and NUI Maynooth and DBS in Dublin.
She is currently writing her second novel (working title: The Earth Dreams).
The Author’s Website:
http://pierasarasini.wix.com/pieraauthor
Connect with Cassandra:
http://cassandrainthemirror.blogspot.ie/
http://www.cassandramorgante.com
https://www.facebook.com/cassandramorgantemagicwoman
Footnotes
[1] Lyrics by Jim Morrison, song by The Doors.
[2] ‘Black is the Colour (Of My True Love’s Hair)’ is a traditional folk song.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Is_the_Colour_(Of_My_True_Love's_Hair).
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