SPRING OF LOVE

An autumn morning, a notebook and the street cleaner

 

Meeting Benches is a website created by digital artist Dastilige Nevante. The site serves as a meeting place and inspiration for artists, thinkers, and dreamers from all over the world. Here, people can share art, stories, and thoughts, creating a virtual community dedicated to beauty and creativity. Dastilige Nevante contributes her digital art to the site, often exploring traditional themes with a modern twist. Using digital techniques, and reinterpreting works by old masters, such as Giambattista Tiepolo and Raffaello Sanzio, she is influenced by different artistic styles. In this post, the thematic benches of Meeting Benches host Mrs. A, a poet, but also a woman in need who we invite to get in touch with us, to get her precious necklace of memories back.

Who has never experienced a summer rain that brings with it a dance between heaven and earth? Maybe you still remember the first drops that, like a prelude to a symphony, fell lightly on you and your thoughts. You have not even forgotten the plants hungry for that precious water, as they raised their leaves. You had catalogued the intensification of the colors, the sensation that everything seemed painted in brighter shades. Yes, you had even wondered if the rain itself could be the artist who had refreshed the canvas of that special day of yours. There was a freshness in the air, memories, a renewed energy, a sense of peace and purification. You had closed your eyes, letting every drop of rain whisper ancient stories to you, of distant continents and infinite seas. But you had not simply been a spectator. That natural wonder had reminded you of the simple and intense beauty of what you took for granted: a spring of love that would last forever.

There is something magical about your autumn morning. You watch the sun rise gently, and the world that seems suspended between sleep and awakening. You walk along the river, with the leaves crackling under your feet and the crisp air that fills your lungs, awakening delicate and intense memories of your first spring of love: laughter and stolen glances, promises whispered among the flowers in bud. As you walk in the cold, every breath is a dive into the past, every fallen leaf a memory of those blooming days. The nostalgia of those who are no longer beside you mixes with gratitude for the moments lived together and for the beauty that persists in memories. By chance, your gaze falls on a garbage container. You approach and take in your hands a notebook, brown and bound in hard paperback. Read the author’s name on the front cover and the title “Spring of Love” at the bottom of the page.

YOU – You are the one I desire. Your voice still rings in my ears. I have a memory of you in my heart. My lips rarely tremble without you. You are the one I like, in whose dream I secretly sneak, about whom I already know almost everything. But when you leave me, I will survive. (Mrs. A’s Spring of Love, page 56)

As you continue your walk, looking at the notebook, you wonder why that woman left it in plain sight. You leaf through the pages and find photographs of a him and a her. There are also images of men and women, cut out and glued to each of the 92 handwritten sentences, more or less long. When you get home, you open your PC, activate the automatic translator and discover the existence of poems that gradually fade, one after the other, into different gradations of love. Finally, after having translated them all, you have a complete picture of the protagonists of that distant spring. You think that both you and they have experienced the same sensations. You are aware that falling in love is an overwhelming and all-encompassing emotion that can be difficult to describe in words. Observing the faces of those unknown people, you find the sensation of intense and almost irrational joy, a mixture of excitement and uncertainty, the existence of butterflies that fluttered not only in your belly, but throughout your body. Every little discovery about the other becomes an adventure within yourself, a new piece that is added to the puzzle of your story that has just ended. You are aware that their desire to know each other deeply, to share secrets and stories, to break down walls and build an authentic connection, is identical to what you yourself had experienced.

SUMMER RAIN – We Walk together in the park, when suddenly the summer rain begins. We will quicken our pace. I will look at you. And the splendor of your manly face reminds me of a flame of fire. I feel the palm of your hand. Do I hear clearly? Is it a dream? We walk in the rain; the shirt absorbs the hot shower. We both drip in silence. I love you; you whisper to me on the hill. We climb the road, you recite poems, the body leans against the body. Oh, how wonderful it is to feel the edge of your collar. I breathe with you and with you I also hold my breath, and the rain drips into the grass. Here and there a thought, one among a thousand, is washed away by the tongue with a drop. We will no longer quicken our pace, but we will get wet of our own free will. Here you give me, there I will give you a hot kiss, and the rain sings our confession in drops. (Mrs. A’s Spring of Love, page 7)

You retrace in your mind the catalog of moments spent together, outside of time, where minutes turned into hours and every instant was precious. At that memory, your eyes shine. You feel more alive, more aware, as if you saw the experience of yourself in the pages of that notebook. Thanks to what Mrs. A may has forgotten, abandoned or deliberately given to you, you reflect that falling in love could be a delicate dance between euphoria and vulnerability, an emotional journey that made you feel both fragile and incredibly strong. You could not have predicted what you would discover two days later, walking in the same place. A man pushes a green wheelie bin, sticks a gloved hand into the bin where you found the poetry notebook. The cleaner seems to be following a well-established ritual. He takes out all sorts of waste, evaluates something unfathomable to you, and throws it into his own wheelie bin. You continue your walk along the river. You appreciate that this stranger has valued Mrs. A’s spring of love.

A COUPLE OF STUPID QUESTIONS – How many dimensions does the word love have, and what is its identification number? Everyone immediately says: a stupid question that takes two to answer. At first it ends in failure, and perhaps then, after years, it will improve. How much is too much for you? A kilometer, a hundred or five? Is it allowed to make jokes about the other person here? Maybe go back when the going gets tough? In what units can this quantity be expressed? Maybe it starts with a kiss, through the ampere, volt and kilogram, meter and mole at the end. After that, everyone has to come alone. How long does the reaction last under standard conditions? When did the first one start, and according to what rules? Will the one who put it in the crown slowly perish himself? When we want to know the answer to unanswered questions, it cannot happen just like that, immediately, according to common sense, without a catalyst, without love. Not by simply tossing a coin. (Mrs. A’s Spring of Love, page 92)

Reflect on the mysterious lady A who had written sentences to capture a sense of deep longing. “Her words also capture the bittersweet nature of memory. It is as if the stranger is holding on to the presence of someone whose name and details are fading. The emotional imprint, however, has remained strong. Her words reveal the existence of a force or forces of attraction, they illustrate the existence of an emotional cord stretched between the clarity of feeling and the vagueness of memory. She had described a touching and recognizable moment.” Ask yourself if you have ever felt this way about someone dear to you. If that person has hurt you, forgive. Remembering touching moments of love is like leafing through a book of emotions. The first kiss and the nights spent talking until dawn, the trips taken together and the small daily gestures, your precious necklace of life.