Perpetual Question

The Perpetual Question.

I journeyed through the night wanted to go back to the past and ask my first love a question that had dwelled, if not festered, on my mind for forty years. She was in her sister’s house and looked at me as she didn’t remember, so I introduced myself. “I know who you are, she said,” “but aren’t you a bit old to be traveling so far?” “For you I will journey as long as it takes, I came to ask you a question did you once love me?” Before she could answer her father came in, looking like Prince Philip, and the pair of them left arm in arm. Her brother in law, who wrote about astrology- a friendly man- promised me a great future, this to assuage my distress.

I walked out of the town and came upon a agricultural landscape with fields after fields of carrots, salads, potatoes, broccoli and cabbage, the farmer, it belonged to, told me he once had a herd of 120 prime milking cows, but had turned vegetarian because of mans cruelty to animals, he had had them slaughtered and put in a mass grave where
a carpet of soft greenness grew, grazed by no one, but happy bunnies.

I met my beloved again, in a bar, she was in a better mood and alone; I was about to ask her my perennial question; when a small, blond woman came between us and said “I have loved you all my life, but you don’t even know where I live!” Ignored her turned to my first love again, but her face was in deep shadows, she was fading fast; I concentrated hard, but couldn’t bring her back, but I knew the answer and it saddened me greatly.

The bus driving back to my own time was leaving, the little blond woman came with me, but as we journeyed she got older and older, when we arrived she was so ancient and couldn’t get off the bus.
The driver, a man with kind eyes and philosophical beard, whom
I had seen in many disguises before, promised to drive her back wench she came. I had no ring to give her, gave her a shiny euro
coin. When she looks at the coin and wonder where it came from
she will realize that I never loved her. She will sigh deeply; perhaps even blubber into her hankie and marry someone else.