A Magickal Reunion

It was amazing how little the park had changed in the past fifteen years. Elaine had changed, though. Fifteen years in an abusive marriage had forced a maturity upon her that had transformed her outlook in all situations. It had changed the way she remembered the events of her past and all the places she had been, except the park.

When she had walked through the trees that morning, it had been as though time had stopped. She was seventeen again… but no, at seventeen, she had been confused and naïve. She had been a child whose understanding of the world was skewed, viewed through that rosy shade of innocence and hope.

This day, it was a new Elaine who walked slowly toward the old oak tree that she recalled from days gone by.

This trip to the park had been a fantasy forever. Through dishpans, death threats, and desperation; Elaine remembered the park. The park had come to represent nirvana to Elaine. From the moment her marriage had ceased to be the ecstatic love affair it had seemed, the park had become a holy place to which her imagination took pilgrimage.

Now Elaine had finally made that pilgrimage in person. The day she garnered the guts to walk away from her husband, she was freed to become what she dared to be. And what Elaine wanted most was to be seventeen again. She wanted a new beginning.

She lithely sat down upon a mossy stone beneath the gnarled oak. Big black ants scurried in trains along the lichen-covered trunk. Beside her lay the thrift store guitar she had brought along. A recent acquisition, used and battered, the instrument still created a clear tone that offset Elaine’s ineptitude. Musingly, she placed the guitar in her lap, and began to strum and hum a song she had written in her mind long ago:

Golden Boy, are you still there

Do you hear my call?

Golden Boy, I dream of you

Do you think of me at all?

She sang softly, her voice ringing clear and bright. Her heart twisted with longing for the fantasy to emerge true. She knew, of course, that it could not be. It had been fifteen years, plenty of time for him to have married and started a family. He could be living the middle-class life he once denigrated, disappearing into the whirlwind of reality. He could have passed through the misty veil before his time.

Golden Boy, I long for you

My love is as a star

Shining bright within my heart

I wonder where you are.

For some time, Elaine strummed sweetly upon her secondhand instrument, wistfully remembering seventeen. As she played, she gazed only at the ground ahead of her. She shyly feared the sight of an audience, a fear that was only overcome by avoidance. Suddenly, a pair of bare, black feet appeared, quietly crushing the grass before her. As Elaine moved her eyes from the ground, the feet became knees, and the knees a face. Elaine’s awareness of her surroundings shifted in the time-space continuum.

Déjà vu

The man smiled.

“I know you,” he whispered, “You were Evan’s sister.”

Elaine had heard that line before, from this same man. Only, fifteen years ago, she had naively answered, “No, I’m his girlfriend,” not knowing that among the hippies who hung around the park, ‘sister’ and ‘brother’ sometimes meant something akin to ‘soulmate.’

Today, she simply smiled. Passing her hand over the ground before her, she offered a seat to her visitor.

He sat, and as Elaine placed her guitar beside her, he glanced questioningly into her eyes. “Kevin.” Elaine’s voice was quiet, almost calm as she faced this man from the past. Kevin’s smile widened in response. He had not been sure she would remember him or if, indeed, this was the girl he had once known.

“I remember you,” he repeated, softly, as he always had spoken. “You weren’t here long, you and your little sister, but you were good people.” The two old friends engaged in a quiet conversation beneath the ancient oak, remembering times spent together in the park and in dark bead-doored rooms intense with incense, marijuana, and rock-n-roll.

Another man arrived, vaguely familiar to Elaine. He knelt to Kevin, who whispered something into his ear. When the visitor left, Kevin asked to play Elaine’s guitar. His fingers whispered as beautifully as his voice, and Elaine remembered that her younger sister had once cared for this man.

In the mid-1970s, this park had been a meeting place for college students, revolutionaries, and leftover flower children. The young people had gathered in a common cause — to have a good time, and to monitor the growth of the marijuana plants that someone had planted among the stones.

It almost seemed now as if time had not passed. If the younger people had not been sporting drastic asymmetrical haircuts and punk-rock clothing, Elaine might have believed it was 1975 again. She looked about her and sighed. Kevin handed the guitar back to Elaine and lay back in the grass, eyes closed to the red heat of the midwestern sun.

Elaine set the guitar in her lap and played. Again it was a poem of fantasy. She sang of the wonders of freedom and the mysteries of hope. She begged for the attentions of a long-lost love. Inferences to other fantasies wound their way through her lyrics, tales of Middle-Earth and Elven lore complementing the fantasia of her romance. Dragon rides and sorcery swept through her story, a golden thread of an enchanted tapestry.

As Kevin slowly dozed off in the summer–induced drunkenness of mid-afternoon, Elaine remained minstrel, entertaining wandering teenagers and middle-aged hippies, oblivious to the gathering audience. Entering a chorus of chamber music-inspired strumming, Elaine became aware of a new face before her. It seemed as if he appeared in mid-air, magically transported from a time beyond.

“Elaine,” he spoke. Elaine blinked twice, expecting him to disappear like a dream. The image remained the reality that it was. “Elaine,” he said again. His voice was a song. Elaine’s heart soared.

She gently placed the guitar beside her and held her hand out for Evan’s assistance.

Gracefully, Elaine rose, encompassed in the diaphanous gauze gown that she had chosen in hopes of this very occurrence. Evan beheld her, captivated by the effects maturity had bestowed upon her. The short blonde seventeen-year-old that he remembered appeared taller in the grace that she had acquired. Sinewy muscles showed erotically through her semi-sheer gown. Blonde hair wisped freely about her shoulders, creating a strawberry-golden halo.

Her blue eyes glistened like beryl in the tears that welled within them as they gazed into his, capturing him, holding him with the strength of her will. He kept hold of her hand, and feeling it, he found himself analyzing it. Well-shaped, as he remembered, yet rough. A working hand, toughened through time and the necessity of earning a living. A strong hand, he thought, the sign of a strong woman.

His assessment ended with the realization that here stood an enigma. She was strong in spirit as well as body, exercised in muscle as well as mind, and yet she was also ethereal. She was a liminal being somehow existing in both Faerie and the mundane world. She was both the girl in his memories and the woman of his dreams. A rush of feeling entered his soul.

The love he had harbored for fifteen years inundated him, flooding his thoughts with knowledge. Here was the girl he had known as his priestess, the woman he had desired as his own. Where had she been? Why had they been rent asunder? How had he forgotten the completion of spirit he had experienced when they wandered hand-in-hand through the park fifteen years past?

As Evan so studied Elaine, she did the same with him. He was tall, much taller than in her memory. His height was a complement to her stature. A Nordic god, he was. No Adonis, nor beautiful to the point of narcissism, but beautiful nevertheless. At nineteen he had been mercurial and mystical. His intelligence had sometimes worked against him.

His parents had not understood their only son, a young man who craved gnosis and sought it in psychedelics and esotericism. Her parents had only seen a boy in blue jeans whose hair was too long and whose love for their daughter seemed too deep and too swift. He himself had been both self-aware and unsure of his place in the mundane world.

Now, at thirty-four, he carried himself with confidence, glowing with the wisdom come of age and mystic study. His extrasensory abilities still set him apart, but it was clear that he had found the balance he had once found elusive. His calling toward another world showed in the depth of his blue eyes. The mystic appeal of his sensuality was gathered in the way he stood, in the way his long blond hair blew in the wind.

His touch brought to her rushes of memory. Power flowed from within him, rendering his fingers electric. Elaine knew at that moment, the moment of contact, that there was no past, there was no future, there was only now. Now, she was seventeen and she would be forever. This was possible because this love, this spiritual unity, was no fantasy but a truth so deep yet so unfathomable that only the spark ignited by the touch of hand to hand, hip to hip, lips to lips was real.

When finally they parted, Elaine kept her eyes fixed upon Evan, as if he might disappear and become once again a resident of her imagination. She picked her guitar up by the neck and held it limply by her side as she took Evan’s hand. With a nod to Kevin and the others, they moved away from the mighty old oak.

Everyone in the crowd could feel the electricity in the air as they separated to let the couple pass. A bright spiritual power emanated from Evan and Elaine, combining to create a purple aura of passion about them both. The aura appeared as a shield to those of psychic awareness in the crowd. It was a protective and engulfing bubble.

Kevin stood long, watching the couple move slowly across the park.

“They are truly soulmates,” he mused quietly, gathering together his emotions. “They should never have parted.”

A bystander asked, “What did you say? I didn’t hear you.”

“No matter,” replied Kevin, “Everything’s alright now.”

© 1985/2023 by Suzy Jacobson Cherry