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"For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? We said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or ever colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone."

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iii. the opposite of faith

Venice was a city bounded to the ocean. The salty sea water came through the canals, seeping into every aspect of Venetian life. The city had always been a part of the sea since the time of the Byzantine Empire and the sea was a part of it.

Eriol had come to this city first a year ago. Fresh out of Cambridge, he was a young man with the whole world at his fingertips. The future was blinding with possibilities. He was offered an editorship at a prestigious literary magazine, yet, he chose Venice. Taking residence in an old white house on the Grand Canal, he immersed himself in Italian culture. Eriol spent his days writing in a nearby cafe or unwinding at a studio of a local artist and spending his nights at the prominent parties of the European elites.

It was an idyllic and comfortable life—and Venice with all the best it could offer him. This life was something fallen from the brush of a 19th century impressionist painter: the elaborate facades on buildings curving with gold and colored marble, the odd arching bridges, the omnipresent sound of water, the history, the richness, the sounds, the lights, the textures. It was all flowing lines and porticos and patterns against an explosion of color.

Venice was an art—the city born of salt water channels, the city forever at the mercy and love of the sea; never tainted by the hazards of modernity, untouched by automobiles. Eriol took regular strolls through the Piazza San Marco and reveled in its wide open spaces and expressive Italian Renaissance architecture that transported him back in time. The piazza was surrounded by basilicas of magnificent Byzantine domes and reaching arcades of overflowing colonnades and colored mosaics. The stone arches were particularly appealing to him; each was delicately carved in marble multiplying into a great distance.

Dawn was torching the sky on fire, Eriol noticed early one morning when he made his way through the Piazza San Marco. He couldn't fall asleep, so he read Yeats by candlelight; candlelight, only for the sake of it. Then, when morning neared, he decided to watch the sunrise from the Piazza. The images of the brooding verse were still thick in his mind.

The Piazza was hauntingly empty at this hour except for the pigeons that crowded the patterned tile floors. He relished the silence: the Venice without its throngs of tourists.

He noticed her then. A dark figure bent among the cooing birds, enveloped in the unearthly purple glow of twilight. She straightened, drawing herself to her full height. There was a fluttering of wings about her and feathers flew in the air. There was something mysterious about her.

Eriol stopped in mid-step. His last footfall left a dreamlike echo reverberating through San Marco. He squint his eyes towards her, the contours of her body strangely familiar to him. Yet she was exquisite. Surely she had fallen from Michelangelo's hands. Surely she was not real.

"Hello stranger," she said in soft lyrical Italian; her voice crisp and clear in the morning mist. She was smiling.

He immediately recognized the voice. It was the same voice that sang to him at dusk on a Japanese beach with the music of the sea. It was the same voice that remained unbending like a redwood against the winter on Windsor Bridge. Words failed him.

She laughed. It was a sparkling laugh that rang throughout San Marco like silver bells, carrying the very substance of joy within it. "Oh, Eriol-kun, have you missed me?"

He was surprised by the sudden change of language and tone. He stepped closer. To his horror, he saw that she had cut her long hair—hair that had been as thick and dark as the night itself were now only loose curls that hung like twisting grape vines above her shoulders. He wouldn't have recognized her face if not for her eyes. No one in the world had that particular shade of amethyst.

How many years had it been now? The years passed by too fast, slipping through his grasp. He still remembered her from their last meeting—it all seemed like a lifetime ago—in some now unfamiliar place. He did not like the way they had left matters last and he no longer knew who she was anymore. But Venice was another meeting place in another time. They were completely different people now, each in completely different places in life.

She told him in her soft soprano voice that she arrived in Venice only the day before. She still lived in New York City, working as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She came to acquire a Rembrandt from a private Venetian collection.

He walked with her and brought her beneath the yellow light of an iron-wrought lamp post. The light made her skin give off a touch of gold. He felt his breath caught in his throat, as if seeing her for the first time. Despite the warm summer air, Tomoyo still held the hush of winter within her, steely and fiery.

"Have you found yourself, my dear Tomoyo?" he asked her airlessly. "Surely, your search had not been in vain."

She let out a soft laugh. "Do you what it is that I have finally learned?"

He shook his head. "Tell me."

In a bold gesture, she took his hands in hers. She tiptoed so her lips brushed his right ear. "Someone told me that the world is not imperfect nor on a slow journey towards perfection," she whispered, her breath hot against his skin. "Eriol-kun, can't you see? The world is perfect every moment and it had always been perfect since the beginning of time."

He turned to study her face. Her eyes were glistening.

"I had spent many years looking for meaning and happiness. But often I only end up empty handed, with only memories of other people's pains and joys. I was only recalling things other people have desired," her voice bubbled. "But the world is like the sea, always merciful and forgiving. No matter what happens, the tide will always rise and fall. The sea will forever sing its song and if you listen closely enough, you will hear what it had always been trying to tell us. That the world is beautiful and perfect just the way it is. Every sin already hold it's forgiveness within itself, every dying man holds eternal life within himself. The sea, oh, the sea, the sea have always been infinite in every direction."

Eriol could not speak.

She pressed her hands against his cheeks. "I never forgot what you told me. The sea is a catharsis; the sea is forever forgiving. I was looking too hard, seeing too much, searching and searching and searching until I was naught. Only then, by the voice of the ocean, did I find truth—the one true thing that everything was already beautiful, everything was already meaningful."

He was surprised by the warmth of her proximity. His back pressed against the black iron of the street lamp, he wanted to touch her hair and to ascertain its length. All he could think about was the endlessness of her skin, pure and smooth flowing like water. He remembered the way she tasted.

There was sadness in her eyes, escaping through a force greater than that of the wind itself. She rested her forehead upon his shoulder. "I like you, Eriol-kun," she whispered. Her Japanese was tender, as if speaking something forbidden.

He chuckled in spite of himself.

"That is all I can give you. This is all I can do," she was sad again. "We are two of a kind, you and I; we are both incapable of loving for we had loved too fiercely for another who was no meant to be. We are spent of love and now there is no more to give."

"What else is there in this world worth living for, carissima, if not for love?" he asked her, his voice belonging to that of a broken man—killing her softly with every caress of his grave tone.

"Truth, Eriol-kun," she answered. "Truth."

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Perhaps the entire notion of love was a misconception. But he couldn't tell; it was all only just words and letters. He only had his memories—soft reminiscences of the sea and waves and times when all they had was the opposite of faith. And that moment, when she was standing against the light in Venice, eclipsing the sun—a shadow of a girl—he recognized the wisdom she possessed. It was much more than the ages and time, much truer than the words he can only speak and never know. She was his highest reverence.

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Author's Notes: Ah, Venice. I've always wanted to write about Venice—the city in a timeless love affair with the sea. I'm rather pleased with the outcome. Yes, I think it will do for now. I might come back to this story someday and edit and fool around with different sentences and words.

Piazza San Marco, where this all took place, had been called by Napoleon as "the drawing room of Europe." Indeed, it is a beautiful place, a cross between a park and a square. It is perhaps most famous today for the pigeons that crowds its floors and hopelessly elaborate Italian Renaissance buildings. The Grand Canal is the biggest and most historical canal in the city. The buildings that line it are beautiful, many made of colored marble.

Yeats, as alluded to here, is perhaps the greatest (and arguably the most difficult) poet of the Twentieth Century. William Butler Yeats is Irish in origin and wrote some of the most amazing verse of the English language. His subject is often occult, full of vivid imagery, magnificent diction and beautiful rhythm and rhyme.

Tomoyo's philosophies, as expressed here, about the perfect state of the world are something I first came by when reading Herman Hesse, a rather famous German existentialist writer. Of course this concept is not something original, it is initially a Taoist idea. When I read about it, I was struck by its simplicity. I believe in that now. Joy is everywhere in life and all you need to do is to stop, relax, and let life come to you. We are trying too hard.

Carissima, as Eriol calls Tomoyo, is an Italian term of endearment. It means my precious one or darling.

Another prompt for 52flavours. Wallace Stevens is wonderful, as always.

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