Lighthouse

Where Time Folded Back To Itself

Chapter Two

Anselmo was till catching his breath when the postman’s voice cut through the afternoon air.

“Anselmo…you have a letter.”

The broom slipped from his hands at once. He stepped outside, heart quickening, joy rising so suddenly it startled him. This was the letter he had been waiting.

“From Manila”, the postman said, already turning away.

Anselmo held the envelope as though it were fragile, something that might dissolve if handled too roughly. He opened it with care. Line by line, smile slowly unfolded. The quiet ache of his solitude, softened, filled by the words of a young woman whose name he had first encountered in the pen-pal column of a magazine, and who had, without knowing it, matter to him.

When he finished reading, he fold the letter neatly, reverently, and set it beside him. Then, with a steadying breath and a hopeful heart, Anselmo reached for paper and pen and begun to write back.

The first letter was followed by many more. What began as a brief introductions slowly deepened into confessions. Until Anselmo’s feelings of love were laid bare. With every letter Elaine sent, the young mans heart grew stronger, sustained by the tenderness carried in her words. He poured the same pure affection into his replies, mirroring the love they shared through ink and paper.

“when will I see you?” he wrote.

“That depends on you, if you wish,” she answered

“I cannot leave the work my father entrusted to me, I have no one else to rely on.”

Filled with longing, Anselmo yearned for more than letters. He longed to speak with Elaine, to see her, to hold his future bride in his arms. She lived in his dreams-every hour of everyday, every minute of every hour and every second of every minute.

“Do not worry,” Elaine wrote “Opportunity will come, if we are destined”

“I hope so,” Anselmo replied, his pen gliding across a blank paper.

“One day…” Elaine promised in her next letter, “You will be surprised.

Those words became a litany of hope, a gentle assurance that they would soon be together, that the emptiness of sorrow would end, and sadness would give way to happiness and renewed hope.

Old Anselmo rose from the worn pallet that had once been his, and his father’s bed when the old man was still alive. The memories pressing in on him were abruptly broken. From the wicker cupboard, he drew out the old letters, lifting the small box that held Elaine’s hand written words.

The oldest letters were on a paper once white, now yellowed by time. They were nearly fifty of them, yet the trail ended abruptly-cut off, untraceable, for reasons he had never come to understand.

He opened one of the last letters and read it, and at once the past rose again before him.

“My father wants to marry me to a businessman, a man much older than I am.”

Anselmo’s heart ached as he read that line once more.

“What about us?” he wondered, as uncontrollable tears fell. He answered her letter with trembling hands.

“Do not agree.”

The plea in his voice could find release only through the pen.. Paper and ink became the silent witnesses to his love for Elaine, faithful until her final letter arrived.

“I will find a way to reach you.”

Elaine’s words carried a fierce promise, enough to ease his fear, if only for a moment.

“How? When?” Anselmo wrote back in his last letter.

“I will run away”

From that letter slipped a photograph, carefully folded, as if it carried a promise too delicate to be spoken aloud. It showed how Elaine would dress, how she would fixed her hair, how she wished to be seen when she finally met Anselmo at the summit of the lighthouse, in the first week of the coming month.

On the back written in a steady hand, were the words: “Elaine, 1980”

It was her last letter. No reply followed. No footsteps came. Elaine never appeared.

Still, Anselmo went to the lighthouse. There, beneath its weathered shadow, he had prepared for their meeting more carefully than ever before, as if devotion alone might summon her presence, as if love, rehearsed and waiting, could turn absence into arrival.

Old Anselmo carefully tucked the letters away once more the letters he had guarded for so many years.

The ancient bed creaked beneath his every movement, its weary roan rising above the silence of the room’

Only an hour remained before dawn. Sleep would not return to him, whether because of his age or because the memories that stirred restlessly within his solitude.

Before the sun could rise, Anselmo resolved to begin the day. With the heaviness in his chest, he made his way down the lighthouse stairs. Seven steps short of the landing, he paused. His gaze drifted to the closed passage leading to the small space he had once prepared, a quiet resting place meant for him and Elaine, should fate have allowed them to meet there. From time to time, he would visit it, clean it, and close it again.

He had placed a sign to guide the tourists toward the front of the lighthouse, an arrow pointing them to the grand view beyond. But the back he kept for private-reserved for Elaine’s arrival. Yet he had grown weary of waiting. He had long convinced himself that her absence must have meant she had married the man her parents had chosen for her.

Anselmo let out a slow breath. He was old now, yet he felt certain that he still dwelled in Elaine’s heart

A cold wind swept through the air. Having left his cloak behind, he felt the chill creep across his body, the night’s breath wrapping around him like an unwelcome embrace.

Once more, longing for Elaine rose within him like a tide that refused to ebb. He returned to the litany of her letters, reciting them in memory as though they were prayers committed to the marrow of his bones. In every line he felt again the ache of desire to see her, to stand before her at last in a meeting that fate had never permitted.

He reached into his pocket and felt for the small key he always carried, it edges worn smooth by years of waiting. The touched of stirred another yearning him; to look again upon the little garden he had made for them- Elaine and himself- a fraile sanctuary carved out of solitude and hope.

The wind rose once more, fiercer than before, sweeping across the lighthouse with a restless howl.

“Is a storm coming?” he murmured to himself.

Anselmo did not hesitate. He turned back and began to climb stairs, intending to fetch his hat and cloak. Yet before he could reach the top of the stairs, the wind subsided as suddenly as it had come. The air stilled. The world returned to its ordinary hush, as though nothing had stirred at all.

Still, Anselmo continued his ascent.

There were duties to be done-inside and outside the lighthouse, small labors that stitched together the hours of his solitary days. And when the morning’s work was finished, he would go, as he always did, to the little garden he had tended for himself and for Elaine. There beneath the quiet sky, he would rest for half the day-resting not only his weary body, but the faithful heart that had never ceased to wait