Nothing beautiful ever dies.
It lives again each time you remember it, a cool pearl you can lay out on the velvet of your mind and admire for the rest of your life. It never fades – in fact, it grows more brilliant as you age, like good wine sweetening in the cellar of your memory.
When I was five years old I fell in love for the first time on a merry-go-round. My mother had brought me to the park and left me with a half-watchful eye as she chatted with a neighbour about the rising cost of gas (a conversation that never ends, but echoes on through the years much like my memories). I played for awhile on the monkey bars, which at that age held no terror for me – I was the eponymous creature, twisting myself in pretzels around the bars – but an older boy elbowed me away, and I went looking for somewhere I was welcome.
I paused a moment beside the whirl of the merry-go-round, watching the older children leaping on and off as it spun a steady blurb beneath the small pine tree. I watched it with what I imagine was naked yearning – it looked like an adventure too quick and wild for me. I was afraid to make the leap, afraid to fall. I thought I might get caught and crushed under it, spinning around for ever and ever, battered and tormented like a cartoon character who never dies, just ‘ow’s and ‘oomph’s his name to the commercial break that never comes.
She stopped next to me. “Don’t you want to get on?” she asked. I nodded glumly. “So?” she asked, “why don’t you?” I shook my head. “It never stops,” I explained. “I always want to try, but it never stops.” She grinned and ran away, three steps that felt like a thousand miles, and she threw her arms up and hollered, “Hol’ on!” and like Moses parting the Red Sea, every eye turned to her. “Gimme a sec!” she announced again. I couldn’t have made a head turn my way, but children raced to obey her wide smile and freckled determination, her bright pink sneakers and mass of curls. The children who seemed to constantly stand to, pushing the merry-go-round, let it slow – even helped to stop it!! Within seconds the merry-go-round was still.
I had never seen a more amazing sight in my life. And this-this-this– miracle! — was for me. She raced back, took my hand, and dragged me, unresisting, onto the platform. She whooped and pumped her hand in a circular motion, and everyone went back to their business. Pushers pushed, jumpers jumped, laughers laughed, and the world went fast and dizzy around me, and I was alive, and free, and she was holding my hand and we were screaming, and I understood devotion for the first time. I would have done anything for her – I even jumped off, later, because she told me I could, and she was right.
I’m an old man now. I’ve fallen in love many times; on side streets, in coffee shops, on a train in the middle of the night. The merry-go-round where I met that girl who I loved so much, whose name I don’t even remember, is old and faded now. Its broken pieces rest in tall, untended grass. That tall pine tree towers now, growing as much above me as I’ve grown above my five year old self, and casts shadows on my stooped and aching back. But that merry-go-round is beautiful still, the memory it gave me even more so – because nothing beautiful ever dies.
Image courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.