Eshin – A Prelude

The first time that I saw him, I was standing on the boundary where the glasshouse meets the garden, with a basket of cut lavender hooked absently over my arm. Beyond the summerhouse, the land rolls lazily away over a lush, grass-covered bank – the gentle, lilting waters of the stream pressing an uneven line into its swell beneath the shady spread of an ancient oak – and down into a summer’s meadow filled with wild flowers.

The storm of days before had long since given way into the pure stillness of a welcome, sun-drenched afternoon, and as I looked across the garden, the sun was warm as heated gold upon my skin.

He was walking in the meadow with his hands lost in his pockets – a hazy smudge of white and gold against the flowered green. I knew I should be frightened by his presence, that I should be bothered somehow by the first sight of someone else lost deep within my paradise, but somehow I simply could not manage it. Somehow, I looked at him and all I felt was love.

He was walking closer to me now – white linen shirt open at the neck, waves and curls of gilded hair drifting on his cheeks, intertwined with poppies, carnations and cornflowers as blue as his dream-filled eyes. Those eyes were so desperately distant as he walked towards me, gazing out across the valley towards the indistinct shadows of the mountains.

I knew his name, and before I had the time to wonder where that knowledge came from, I found it on my lips:

“Eshin…”

My voice was little more than a breezy whisper, lost easily beneath the birdsong, bee-flight and bubble of the stream, but in that instant he looked up at me. He caught my gaze and I felt a dreadfully ecstatic wave of peace wash over me like blossom-fall.

He smiled, and before I knew what I was doing, I had set my basket down into the grass and I was walking down the bank towards him.
Perhaps an hour later, and not another word has passed between us two. Now we are lying on the grassy bank beside the stream, just out of reach of the shadow-hands cast down upon the grass by the canopy of oak leaves. The languid peace of everything soaks us like sunshine, warming us and painting us shades of idle gold. I am playing with his doll-like curls of wheat-gilt hair, and he does little more than look at me with vague and careless eyes.

Finally, the sound of horses calling sweeps up to us through meadow grass and gives me all the strength I need to speak again, although my voice is temperate as the stream.

“Who are you?” I say, although now the question drifting through my mind is given voice, it doesn’t seem important. And so I find myself adding: “What are you doing here with me?”

“You know my name,” he answers, his voice as distant and as dulcet as his eyes. “I heard you say it once before, or rather, I felt it as you spoke it.”

He turns away enough to roll lazily onto his back, his hands linked loosely behind his head and one knee bent off of the ground. Lying in the grass with a poet’s poise and elegance.

“My name is Eshin,” he says, as though I had forgotten. “And I am you, my Rosalie. I am a part of you made flesh. And I am here to comfort you. I am here to help you through the dark.”