this story will be told and retold, forever, to infinity.
ad infinitum
Even though time and age and everything in-between has riddled his body, his mind, his features – his brilliant smile is no less dazzling.
He flashes it at her though it's empty of the memory of their time and years together. He shares it with their grandchildren, whose names he cannot recall.
He relearns their names every day, only to forget them come the following morning.
He spends his days watching her and them, and there's not much for him to do, so he spins stories of epic tales about their adventures taken and battles waged from a time so very long ago.
Many humor him and his animated retellings with kind smiles and neutral skepticism.
But she knows they aren't just stories.
He doesn't remember their life together on most days anymore. But sometimes, when someone says her name, his eyes shine with distant, cloudy recognition. When he tests her name on his tongue, the sweet smile it invokes gives her peace. Because even as old age and this unforgiving disease wars with his mind, his body, his memories, somewhere inside him she remains out of reach; untouchable, a fire that cannot and will not be extinguished.
As he always swore his love for her was.
'Till death do us part.
Because he also swore no force other than death existed that could tear them apart.
And she so desperately believed him.
In the face of their permanent union and in the days and years surrounding their untouchable happiness, they both forgot that sometimes seperation could occur in ways unrelated to orders and continents and cold, deadly bullets.
They speak his name often, for it is one thing he can still recognize.
Sometimes, there are days he wakes and mourns, rages unconsolably at demons and forces that have long since been erradicated from their earth.
Those are the days he mixes their nightmares with reality.
On those days, she never made it off the Damocles; never was found in that camp.
On those days, he didn't live through Somalia, either.
He swears his stories of her don't do her legacy or beauty justice. But if the look in his eyes as he recalls her is anything close to the love he has for her, then she was everything to him and more.
Even in these days his mind and memory are lost, she is still the center of his very universe.
Every day, his only request of her while they sit with hands clasped is her life's tale.
"There was a girl, you know. Like in your movies."
She never bothers with stories and books, for his movies were his stories, and their story was too epic for the restrictions set by ink and pages and text and mere words.
Besides, they spoke with their eyes, not with their words, or lips.
(They engaged their mouths in other ways, in other demonstrations of their love.)
She tells this tale the same way each and every time.
A world in which he was there to save her, time and time again. He would save her from fathers, from countries; from bullets and the darkest of humanity.
But most of all, he saved her from herself.
By the end of her tale, though, his eyes will slip silently shut and tears would escape from underneath wrinkled eyelids and cling to greying lashes. They trail down his cheek and around his warm, crooked smile.
"No," is his response, shaking his head, and his hands always clasp her tighter, with an aching longing that brings her own tears to her eyes.
"She saved him."
