A re-telling of the true 12th century love story of Heloise and Abelard. Abelard is a great philosopher and theologian who has taken, like many academics of the time, a vow of celibacy. When he is hired as a tutor for the brilliant and beautiful Hel...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
━━━━━━━━┛ ✠ ┗━━━━━━━━
"Sing me that song," I'm mumbling sleepily against his ear one night. Every night, we spend these precious few hours together before he departs back to his own chamber, traveling through the cloistered pathways under the cover of shadows.
"Which song?" he asks. I'm in his arms, and he's gathering me to him. It feels, in the empty night and the light of nothing but the few stars out the window, that we are the only two people left on earth.
"You know the song," I pull myself up to my elbows so I can lean over him. I smile into his eyes. "Sing my favourite song. I know you haven't forgotten it."
He rolls his eyes, but his widening smile betrays the gesture. My face is in his palms now and his irises beam into mine. I could die happy right here. I could forget about the whole rest of heaven and earth and die happy right here. He brings me to him and his lips brush my forehead.
He sings, and it's a melody I still know deep in my bones. His voice has the rasped coating of added years, but it is still his voice; it is still the most beautiful sound I know. "May the first time I forget your name be when I no longer remember my own,"* drifts to me in his twirling, lyrical lines.
And I wonder how we could have ever thought this music was something worldly and carnal to be ashamed of. My name on his tongue, these melodies... they sound just as holy, just as beautiful, as the hymns the choir sings at mass the next morning.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I am on one side of the chapel, standing as Abbess at the front pew of all the nuns behind me. And he is at the front pew, as Abbott, on the other side, with all the monks in lines behind him. I love to glance over, stifling my smile, to see him bathed in the stained glass. To see him through the fog of rising incense. To see him against the backdrop of the golden icons. They become halos, framing his face. He becomes holy. And he does not look to me, but I know by the lifting edge of his smile that he sees me watching in his peripheries.
I lose myself to the music sometimes, closing my eyes and letting it ring through my veins. I lose myself in the smell of burning candles - dripping wax, a smell warm as honey... I lose myself in the warmth of the incense, smoke coating my skin and clearing my nostrils. They say incense rises our thoughts and prayers up to heaven with its lifting smoke, so I always close my eyes and mutter some prayer as it brushes me. I lose myself in the dots of stained glass reflections that spin around the carpeted cathedral floor as the sun shifts in the sky. I lose myself in the icons, in their glimmering gold... in the faces above and around the altar. The saints, painted in all their glory... I love them all. I lose myself in all of this beauty, within this chapel and across the rolling hills of the countryside it's nestled in; I lose myself in the beauty of the open horizon outside the window, and in the beauty of everyone within these pews, and it swells in me, brimming my eyes and painting a permanent smile across my face that I carry with me all day; sometimes, I cannot believe how beautiful this world is if you just look at it under the right lights.
