Memoirs of a Flower Child - George S Geisinger (the best books to read txt) 📗

on waking, later. His dreaming was full of understanding and short on memory.

The mature artist spoke his love with his disciplined, gentle hands. Hands skillfully speaking through his six-stringed, nylon-stringed, wooden voice, his Nature's Cradle. The artist could remember instinctively now, knowing another love in that long-ago, ruined youth of his, before all that would have to happen afterward, to heal him, it had all had to happen just the way it did happen, as his present-day performance to an outstanding audience brought a more clear understanding of his life to him as he played his own creations on his solo, classic guitar. It was for this purpose that he'd been kept through all those horrible, awful years.
His Maker had given him a series of dreams to help him to recover his youthful brilliance after his long illness. His breakdown was a severe experience, and it repeated itself several times in his youth, equaled by the severity of many of his terrible troubles when he was young. His Maker had given the artist the heart of his true love, to help him understand the true nature of human love, as well as the true nature of the deeper love of God Himself. His Maker had given him so many beautiful gifts over the years since the olive-drab, over his time of becoming.
Playing on this stage, to this audience, felt to the artist like the ultimate fulfillment of his purpose for existing, his redemption. He was performing his own music to an adoring audience. For this purpose was he kept.

The girl had spoken her heart to him long ago, a little while before the olive-drab cell with the olive-drab clothing he had had to wear. She had spoken with her strong, kind fingers, coursing up and down her ivory keyboard, as he turned the pages of her intricate master scores, her university lessons, as she coursed through her talented, intelligent, gloriously beautiful youth, daily rehearsing, speaking her love to his heart through her piano. She spoke of her love in her frank innocence, in their shattered relationship, speaking so especially to his own young heart, playing her piano for him, practicing with all the love of the centuries encapsulated into one single moment of music after another, sparking the romance of his lifetime. He could remember loving in that way, until his health had failed him, and he knew he had to let her go. His illness would not have been fair to her. He had to set her free.
He was on stage now, in his dream, a lifetime later, crying through his guitar, without the necessity of tears in his eyes, letting the instrument weep for him. It was his heart and his guitar that cried. He'd been through all the tragic memories long enough that he could allow the instrument to speak his emotions for him now. His instrument knew what he wanted to say. He'd worked with the composition of his pieces to speak the depths of his sadness in his aging heart. He'd long-since known that he'd lost her.
His audience would not understand his years in the state hospital. They would not understand the loss of his one, true love. Not in words they would not understand, but his instrument could say it all for him in his art, and the world would understand that.
There were no words to be sung. He'd long ago stopped trying to sing, his voice ruined from strong smoke over so many years, a lifetime of smoke. Nature's Cradle did the singing. She was his first love, his cradled, singing guitar, whom he'd loved long before he'd met the girl.

It wasn't that he knew nothing of the girl after he'd set her free. She'd married a friend of her brother's, from the Navy, after she'd graduated from university, where she and the artist had been in love in their impressionable youth. She gave that sailor, who became her husband, children of their own. She could not come back to the artist. She could not come back. He understood. Though they'd love each other a lifetime, they were forever separated, because of his illness, and because of the family she mothered elsewhere. She was not lost to him just as surely as she was lost to him. His heart remembered how it felt to love her. That love was the purpose of knowing her in the first place. He could never loose that memory. His love was immortalized. His guitar could always speak of her to his audiences.
When he finished his concert, his hip aching from an old wound, his audience rose to their feet with warm applause. His heart was full of love, full of a recovery his audience could not understand in concrete terms. All he could offer was the ethereal terms of the music. But that much he could do with all mastery.

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Text: George S Geisinger
Publication Date: 04-22-2012

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