Lovingly Shared

As inner-city children of a certain ethnic demographic - it was not all that surprising, given what she often mused was a kind of precocious inquisitiveness not quite of the same enterprising quality she saw around her now - they were thrown together through mutual exposure within a larger circle of acquaintances. Friends they might be in the most casual sense, but she never felt she belonged. Anywhere. She felt herself to be an impostor, an outsider, felt nothing comfortably in common with all those others.

She had been accustomed to social contact with the children of her parents’ friends, and found social acceptance there. But never completely relaxed comfort; even then non-conformist in a social manner. He had been caught in a larger net of young boys and girls meeting within a more institutionalized framework, where the community established casually-encouraging friendship centres to assist their young to make unconscious future commitments to those within the ethnic group.

They recognized in one another attributes that made each attractive to the other. Bringing them into a tandem that would result in their interior compass setting a direction that would take them through life together. They had much in background commonality, yet even within similar backgrounds there were enough traditional differences of social custom to ensure that they discovered in each other an awkwardly opposite heritage and tradition of customs. There was a certain intrigue in that.

It was not the shared portions of their backgrounds that drew them to one another, but the compulsion of a boy emerging into adulthood meeting a girl practising adulthood, both curious and willing to learn about the greater mysteries of life. And, incidentally and instinctively seeing in one another the potential answers to some of their questions. That, perhaps more than anything drew them together. Was it not ever so? Along with the fact that he, like her, felt socially clumsy, awkward, not nearly as unselfconscious as their peers. In one another’s company they felt the comfort of relaxed security.

He had the rough and awkward edges of a boy and she had already left that stage of a girl’s groping for the future against the inconveniences of the past far behind her. His clumsiness occasionally troubled her, but that was weighed off against the fascination she felt for those experiences he had in his life that had been so different from hers. Together they experimented with life in all its dimensions.

What better time to begin than as young people barely into their teen years? Those were the socially formative years, and they grew together, in spite of their often different perspectives; his already inclined to social conservatism, hers touched with a legacy of social justice. Despite, it might be added, their parents’ aversion to their inconvenient closeness to one another. Too young, they clamoured, as though in unison, never having yet met. Get out, meet others. How can you compare if you’ve nothing to compare with?

Even at that young age she had already invested herself in a kind of intellectual snobbery and his lapses into occasionally sloppy street vernacular offended her. She would tartly correct him, and he would grin sheepishly, accepting the verbal slap-down. Nothing about her bothered him.

They were in many ways like brother and sister. The bond they developed was that close. Sharing confidences, concerns, aspirations. But if their relationship was like that of siblings, then it was that of siblings engaged in covert incest. Chance offered them those opportunities and they grasped them, and with little damage to their conscience. They hungered for one another like fervid, adult lovers at a time when they still played children’s board games in quiet moments together. What they had most obviously in common though was their shared love of literature, and reading.

He played football at his school, she took part in some theatrical productions at hers. They went to school dances and showed up on other social occasions at community centres. They regularly walked together in public parks, and just as often went together to a local library, browsing among the stacks to select what they each preferred in reading material.

His was an omnivorous reading habit, consuming short fiction, history, detective fiction, Arctic exploration and the classics. She was absorbed in reading the classical Greek myths, Egyptian and general Mid-East archaic discoveries, autobiographies. In that sense, for their age, they were in a class of their own, she always felt.

They married while still in their late teens. Among other things that absorbed them was finding a place of their own after completing high school studies and finding jobs commensurate with their education levels. And joining a book club since they moved themselves to the outer stretches of the city where libraries were absent.

Four years later when their first child was born the city began to grow up around where they lived, at first slowlly, then with renewed vigour as the general population increased and the search for adequate housing was unabated by a continuing influx of immigrants from abroad.

When their children were young, he discovered in himself a flair for design and a desire to produce objects of artistic expression. Over the years he developed a myriad of interests, all self-taught, all progressing to the stage where his output was both varied and energetically expressive - from building furniture of classical design, to painting of watercolours, and designing and producing stained glass pieces.

For her part, literature remained her expression and she developed a facility for placing words in conjunction with one another where they agreeably formed poetry, short stories, essays. While his output decorated their home and made them both feel proud and appreciative of the beauty that surrounded them, hers lay secreted away in a bottom drawer. Eventually she made some tentative efforts toward publication, and eventually over the years her poetry, short stories and essays made their way into small, independent-press literary magazines and academic journals.

Their children, unsurprisingly, adopted their parents’ interests, and all of them displayed their own abilities over time, both creative and academic.

Over time, for reasons of her own, she withdrew from the immensely satisfying acknowledgement of her literary talents and wrote no more. She had at first exposed her early work to her husband, feeling he was in as good a position as any critic to evaluate the quality of her work. He read a few of her stories and congratulated her, and that was the extent of his interest. He was pleased she was busy and immersed in doing something that had value to her. It was not his habit to enquire whether she had anything he could read preparatory to sending an item out for possible acceptance for publication.

She eventually wrote a few longer manuscripts, completed them, one as a novel the other as a social commentary, then put those away, too. Out of sight but never out of mind, not completely, although their life together continued to evolve and to cocoon them in a cradle of mutual gratification of all that they experienced together.

The fruit of his exuberant creativity increased over time and they were hemmed in with aesthetic objects that gave them both great pleasure. Eventually, their children began to accept the excess of their father’s artistic output to adorn their own homes.

After they both retired from the workforce, his creative streak began to take on a frenetic tone, and he applied himself more vigorously than ever to his multi-talented pursuits. Every wall of their home was covered with paintings, every window was covered with stained glass, every surface held some quaint object he had designed, every bit of floorspace proudly stationed furniture he had crafted.

She carefully dusted all these treasured and beautiful objects and began to realize that she too had a need to create, not merely to admire and to languish within a odd dissonance of ennui.

She began writing again. For herself. To re-create the inevitable reward of satisfaction that flooded her on the completion of a poem, a story of her imagination. She relished the feeling she felt while conspiring with her muse to expand on a thought, something that stimulated those long-in-abeyance creative impulses.

A sense of accomplishment soothed her and encouraged her to continue. She became besotted with the impulse to write. He knew she was absorbed once again in writing, and he teased her about it, and embraced her at every opportunity for her soft and loving continuity. Their shared complacency in their loving regard for one another was obvious to them, not only a comfort but an inspiration sparking both of their creative compulsions.

With each new piece of creative work he accomplished she praised his effort and enjoyed living with it. With each new piece of creative work she produced, she mentally hugged herself and teased her mind to help her muse form yet another. She became so obsessive a writer that no single day elapsed without its quotidian creative writing piece.

She felt assured; her creative legacy was there, no longer shut away in a dark drawer no one might ever access, but in bright, living language, tenderly posted each day on the Internet, on her very own publishing site. Hers a mute, unanswered cry for recognition of the expressive bounty of her fevered mind - resounding in that great indifferent space of Time-and-the-Wired-World.