Two Souls With One Body and Two Wings

Mikhail Bazankov during Literature Week at the Kostroma Writers Organization, a year or so ago.

***
Can Flowers Change Your Life? XVI. April 3, 2016

  Your witchery is of a different order from others’–and springs, I believe, from the extraordinary self-possession you command.  It is unique in my experience of women.  You have my unqualified esteem and respect; you have my trust and my heart; and if I love you, my dear, it is as one loves the familiar room to which one returns after desperate wandering.  In this room I might draw the shades upon the world and live in comfort forever.  Do not cry for me, Jane, but carry me always in your heart, as one who loved you for that courage to be yourself, and not what convention would have you be.  Your Rogue.  --Jane and Her Lord’s Legacy by Stephanie Barron, 290.

“One day, Judy, each of us will have one wing, and we will fly somewhere together.”
--Mikhail Bazankov, August 1990.

I never thought of Jane Austen being 
like me in her love life, but in this 
imagined portrait by Stephanie Barron, 
I see new truth.  The older I get, the
more I love Jane’s mind.  She is herself,
her thin rapier giving us truths about
our foibles, our goodness, and our
essential humanity.  One man I loved
told me he was always comfortable 
in my presence.  I barely understood
the significance. Of course then a bold,
outrageous man would find Jane’s
mind and heart his comfort.  Mikhail
never used those words, but he didn’t 
need to.  When he and I were at peace
and simply attuned one to another,
in those rare, heightened moments,
that was why.  We were separated by
distances, of miles, and responsibilities
to ourselves and other people.  We 
fought, hurt each other, tried to get away,
but the join always held.  It holds today,
though you died late last year.  I hope,
my love, that now you live in comfort
forever.  Here I continue to work my way
through a thicket of problems and doubts,
but come to rest at intervals in your
presence when we simply were together,
two souls with one body and two wings.

My phalaenopsis, given to me by the Xin family in 2015, had twelve blooms. In 2016-May-July, it has had twenty-four blooms, and still has two that refuse to fall.  It doesn't take much water, but it needs light!