"I feel nurtured and satisfied" she said. "For so many years it was only the wounds of pruning that defined me. Perhaps I even cut myself too deep at times. But it seemed necessary."
"And now?" he asked. He took hold of the Zinfindel and refilled her glass.
"Now." A pause to reflect and savour the wine that had been strenghened by time and the care of a young vintner. "Now. I do believe that I have bleed out, scabbed over and healed up. And you know, as ugly as that all was for a time, HELL, as ugly as I was for a time, it's woven itself to become the most beautiful pieces of me."
"Impossible for me to conceive of you ever be anything other than beautiful." His voice calm and seductive, the hours of the day beginning to stretch their way into the early morning but yet to see the light.
"Ah, but you and I" pausing for another sip of liberation "declare beauty quite differently. These breasts and this skin along my neck are reminders that beauty is a flower whose bloom is in youth. Fleeting. Illusion. Proof only that we have this temporary power to lay men at our feet, hopeful that we might spread ourselves before them."
She held the glass upward, intoxicated by both the words she spoke and the shadows that swirled around them. "We are all in the grip of time's embrace." Philospophical now, her words walking the razors edge of two worlds "She my friend forgets no one and waits for none. But she does, if we are priviledged enough and brave enough, show us that beauty is everything, even the things most of us can't bare to see in others, let alone ourselves."
