He stood up and pick his wife up in his arms easily. ‘Enough of that talking, let’s go to bed.”
He knew deep down that with his old wife, there is spirituality and true beauty in all that they shared because they were simply following the set path outlined in Fibonacci’s sequence; in a world spiralling outwards with excitement, ambition and unnatural sex with his twenty-one year old mistress, he will always come home to this sameness, to this life in Die Uitkyk, living simply with his family. Individuals don’t have an independent existence but exist only as part of an ensemble of many. Maybe that’s the meaning of life that he had been seeking, he thought: just to live each day well and love truly and deeply those who love you selflessly, to propagate that love that lies beneath all aspects of creation.
She wriggled out of his arms and kicked her shoes off. In her stockinged feet, she stood six feet three quarters of an inch tall.
“Just promise me one thing, PW,” she said as she began taking off the clothes; the way she did it with her back facing him, her head turning slightly towards him as she spoke sent his heart thudding like the hooves of wildebeest in his ribcage.
“What?” His eyes ate her hungrily. At this moment in time, he would have promised her anything and everything she asked.
Her clothes came off swiftly, deftly, until she was stood there in her lacy white panties. Where did she get those from, he wondered inconsequentially. She turned to face him, meeting his eyes steadily. “Never stop going to church, PW, even when you are far away from here. Because we have to love like we did in the beginning. All this will pass and in the end there is only the love between us that matters. And whatever we have missed with each other in the bad times like now, together we possess the precious, the real, the one true path. So don’t stress, my husband, just love.”
She put a white cotton nightie over her head, slid her arms into the sleeves and fastened the buttons.
The cynic in him wondered if life could really be that simple: just love your wife and all would be fine. And then he thought, for all the unimagined vastness and unfathomable complexities of the Universe, there are only four fundamental forces that shaped everything.
She got under her covers and held her arm out to him. He removed his trousers quickly and joined her eagerly under the covers.
‘Just hold me, PW,” she said firmly, much to his disappointment. But as they lay nose to nose, he felt a gladness permeating his heart.
“Hey,” he said softly to his wife, feeling like a seventeen-year old inexeperienced youth, like the plasjaapie he had once been all those years ago. He smiled at her in the dark and she felt, rather than saw, his smile. He stroked her hair gently, and he thought to himself, how beautifully our bodies fit together like this.
He wasn’t sure whose lips found whose, but when they met, it was sweetness itself. The tentative first touch, soft like the caress of dawn, holding the same shyness and the same smile. The hunger and the yearning were there but they were tamped down by something deeper and infinitely sweeter. His fingers undid the top three buttons of her nightie and he slipped his hand in to cup her left breast. And there his hand stayed as they fell asleep together, nose-to-nose, lips lightly touching.
I am the integrity you lost when you became like her instead of becoming truly you, she whispered in her sleep. And for once in this lifetime, the Higgs field was completely silenced in tribute to the loveliness of this purity and giving, all the particles within it stilled and the four fundamental forces were in abeyance.
Excerpt from Chapter 15: Natural Laws
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