So Dear to My Heart

The Papyrus of Ani, 1400 B.C. Why do you return? What could they mean to you now— this flesh, these openings, these candles burning at each end of my body as if warmth and light could reach me? What is it you desire? What lack is there in Heaven? I always thought it would be terrible to be beyond change. Now we are both beyond change; there is nothing I can give you. You have returned to me in the form of a bird; your wings are large, they would enclose me. How tremulous and soft you are, your slow, feathery turnings of love, of desire. My arms are rigid at my sides. There is so much I do not want to remember. You remember everything, and cannot rest. Each transgression. Each lily slowly opening. How so many times you watched me move from innocence to bitterness, from bitterness to rage, and then forgiveness. It's strange how I had to forgive the earth for not loving me, each rock and tree, knowing all the while I did not matter, that the inanimate is beautiful because it cannot feel. Now I am inanimate. Your longing a flame that cannot wound me. Your wings embrace an emptiness like air.

Kvinnen og bjørnen (The Woman and the Bear), Edvard Munch, 1908-09

Lithograph crayon on paper