Quiet Wars (Part 2)

            So that beautiful and amazing part came early. But before, with others, it had never seemed to stay. A friend had once told him that it simply couldn’t last and gave a few of what he thought were good reasons.  Reasons? Or rationalizations? Did it really make any difference? Hell, this guy was the most rational person he knew, an engineer. What could he expect?

            But they were rationalizations and not reasons and it makes a difference.  The guy spoke of the amount of energy needed to sustain that kind intensity and how no one could keep it up for an extended time.  It was as if he was talking gas mileage or nuclear fission or fusion or whatever the hell makes a star burn.

            Burn out or fade away. Were those the only choices? Whatever. Whichever.

            But he had a real problem with seeing it the same way as what his friend referred to as “the physics of energy conservation”. He knew nothing like this was so simple. Even physics has its quarks. No one’s ever seen, weighed, or measured one of these sub-atomic fairies.  But assume, just for a moment that they exist, just believe in them, and all at once a lot of things start making sense where they didn’t before.

            So surely, by her very nature, or his perception of her nature, there must be something here to which the rules don’t apply. She was always in the periphery and only occasionally did she mount her serene attacks into his center, softly dominating him despite his intimate knowledge of what he couldn’t know. 

            She did it the same way every time. In the midst of a turbulent day, a calm would descend, intrude and force him to stop. And before he saw her, before he smelled her, he knew. Placid waves swept and broke and penetrated with silent, invisible power.

            They were careful never to give a sign, the slightest hint, that there was anything. They knew it was there and knew that giving it voice, giving it any acknowledgement, would cheapen it. Better to have killed it outright than turned it into something less than it was. 

            It was beautiful, searing and crystalline only as long as it breathed in silence. But give it voice, release it from solitude’s vacuum, and it would become something common and sullen and devoid of mystery or beauty or honor, ugly even. If ever spoken it would be nothing more than a married woman’s emotional affair.