What could make a sight more beautiful than twin lovers entwined - each perfected, if only for a moment, in the other's embrace. Only those who live without love could carry the audacity and boldness to profess the inescapable darkness and cruelty of this world. And how immensely wrong they would be to do so, how fiercely misled and thick with ignorance the shadow of their unknowing. To have lived through such love is to have received undeniable proof of the ultimate gladness and grandiosity of life, and the final and most truest intentions of the wizened arm of its creator. Life, as the lasting symbol of man's quest for inner perfection and purity, culminated with the fierceness of a single, fleeting moment - the tragedy of its impermanence serving as its crowning jewel. That is the unlikely meeting of two lovers, transcending all probability, and each and every limitation - stood victorious in the undeniable power of their maiden caress. The might and potency of their first kiss could hold up the very passage of the ages, the weight of its meaning bearing down on the gates of futility itself - announcing its arrival. And stoking yet the infinite yet ever-dimming light of hope of their sacred reunion - in a place, perhaps, beyond circumstance and time - forming the victorious image of heaven itself, allowing man a single passing glimpse into its divine and unknowable machinations. Would not the pain of any cruelty, or misfortune, or sorrow be made obsolete by the fulfillment of its promise? Would not forgetfulness itself, and every great theatre of life, or the gravity of each bleak century or age, be made to serve, in secret, the formation of such euphoria and bliss? Over, and over, and over again. Heaven itself is little more than a place of meeting - where those strung together by innocent longing may see one another anew, consummated in its infinite portals. The unlikely meeting of two, their union in oneness - shaped by the heavy hands of time, flung across imperfect ages, transcending finality itself - immortalized in paradise. ![[IMG_4349.jpeg]] The piece is "Romeo and Juliet" (1884) by Frank Bernard Dicksee.