Of all the times my heart has cherished, once only has it felt a love so true

Looking back at moments like these, when in life a cross roads appears, I take my heart to remember.  I can count them in one hand, though most people think I am always in love, the opposite is true.  My sister simply refers to my choices as complicated.  Of all the times my heart has cherished, once only has it felt a love so true, so intense that it would be the only one it needed for a decade.  The kind that needs not to be loved in return, the kind that absorbs the light of the other only to shine brighter, the kind that brews for years to come.  That years past can still feel the touch on the skin like his hand is still there, taking memories to flood back to that lost moment.

It took me so long to want to find that again - I came so close to letting it reach me this past year, so close that the sound of his laugh drunken my spirit, and a look from him sent me breathless.  An impossible love.  So close this feeling came to be like before, I held it tight, I engrossed myself in it, I chased it like rainbows - I wanted to remember…

Wanted the sweetness of his body embracing mine like Jay had enveloped me the night I knew I loved him more than life.  Knowing in a single moment that I just wanted to make him happy, hold his dreams beside mine - walk his walk into forever.  So close did this new love come to thoughts of Jay, to forgotten feelings, to the final silent words uttered the last time I touched him, so afraid of losing him, so fearful of his reaction.  The final words that would pierce my heart and stick to it like glue for years to come.  Before I left you told me I was the only person who ever got it - that in moments when he was falling apart that I always just knew, and that even though he never said anything- that when I would walk up behind him and touch his back in acknowledgement or hugged him - it meant the world - that he never let anyone else touch him for no reason - and he was sorry he never said it.  I never expected he felt what I felt. An electric current through the bones from the touch of hand, a silent whisper in passing.  I saw it in his eyes, looking through mine with the same sentiment that held me upright. 

But I saw the fear too, the scars that prevented us both from leaping forward. I have been sorry for that, almost everyday, unable or unwilling to love anyone like that - a terrible thing to say, to think, to feel when life has brought me so many other memories, so many people to cherish.

And now before me stands a person that awakened the side of me Jay had put to rest.  His mad spirit akin to mine, his humour and happiness enlighten me and see within me the part that most can never understand.  So the roads are parted, to open my heart to love another who by all means does not love me in return would come only at the cost of letting Jay's memory fade.  But I do love the way my whole being smiles when he walks into the room...

The Water Diviner (2015)

I could write an essay on Russell Crowe; the way he immerses himself so mythically into each character.  How valid and truthful his representations of each persona, etc, etc.  I could go on forever that I had no doubt in my devoted little mind that there would be no question he would make a great director, of the likes of Eastwood (Bridges of Madison County - 1995); imagining that much like me he must see the stories unravel in his head, laid before him like a picture book, scene by scene, play by play. 

What I did not expect was a story about unity, about love, about the kind of feelings that could only be so raw and clear when you know nothing else.  The kind of parental sense one acquires at the birth of a child; the one that common people like us experience when we first loose sight of a toddler in a room full of other people, when the sound of our own stands us to attention.  In the film, The Water Diviner, Joshua Connor, stands on the grave of his sons, in the hills of Gallipoli, on a mountain drenched  with unknown bodies.  He knows, in an unfathomable way, that his boys lay there, groundless, waiting to come home.    A moment in a film to be usually, characteristically criticised; much like the look of disbelief that overshadows the soldiers around him.  

This man, Connor, who travelled across oceans just to bring home the bones of his sons; this man, who had such an acute attachment to home and land that it seemed to me only plausible that he could find them.  Impossible actually, would have been his failure.

A story of journeys, of lost and found, of possibilities and expectations; The Water Diviner gave me a sense of belonging, a patriotic understanding that I have rarely found in war films. The sound of Edward in his last moments was more painfully honest than any other moment ever recalled, the flashback of that scene even more heartbreaking to conjure.  A loss unimaginable, a torture unseen. The reality, however, much like in a Wilfred Owen poem, shows that war is a time and a place over a landscape that will never see the world in the same way.  Moreover, though, that war affects people, families, cultures in ways unexpected and unwavering.  That individuals are immeasurably people, who follow a belief and hurt each other in the name of something or someone.  But who beneath the skin, the time and the place, are all the same, just human beings.  Capable of being friends, lovers, family, when no expectations are laid.

There is something that appears more truthful, more whole when the story we see or read about comes from another place, it cements its reality.  The novel, of the same name, written by Andrew Anastasious and Meaghan Wilson-Anastasious can be no less impacting than the film; searching for the reality of war, the aftermath of the reasoning and explanation for such loss.  But moreover to the honest hard look of what is left behind, and the steps we take, though perhaps not in the same degree as Joshua Connor, to come to terms and rest in peace the devastation and the loss.

He did not disappoint, Mr Crowe, he gave me a film that was honest, raw, mystical and romantic to boot.  The half cup of sugar in the coffee, was a perfect moment to leave a story that was not looking to find that kind of sentiment in a world shattered by loss, but that gave the audience hope to give a deserving character a touch of well earned happiness.

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