Kampong

The Mirror of Two Souls

Photo by Michelle Murphy

Two faces looking at each other. Liquid eyes emerging from the other soul. Liquid eyes walking on top of flowers I don't have the name for. We dive -- just to find ourselves hanging and barely breathing at the surface. A surrogate soul. -- The purple flower finds its perfect match on the water. From all these flowers, only one belongs to a perfect image. Or is it the image that belongs to the perfect purple flower? And the green water fans are floating in a natural still liquid mirror - each one is also a duo: the real one and the one that depends on. -- Music that stands still. Just as if Monet had put them there with his brush. With his eyes, with his hand.  Because Monet was the God of Purple, the God of Gardens. I don't want to describe the apparent silence in this garden. This remote peace. The big green petals are like music. A green piano standing in the water. This photograph captures so much life and life is rarely silent. I see the illusion of two - the illusion of love. I wonder what's in life that explains the biology of plants growing in water and being attached to a liquid, moving, ever changing surface? What are their roots, do they have any? How long are they? How deep? What is the biology of twos, the binary logic we are so accustomed to taking for granted: a heart and a soul, two bodies moving, two flowers growing, the water and the wind, the rain and the sky? Why do we mirror each other when we love, or do we? So in my head, I see us touching this green, musical floating keyboard: we go from one to the other, with light feet and we are momentarily part of a garden, a garden that exists only with music. Ophelia doesn't, Ophelia is gone. Has she ever existed in a musical garden or has she always been silent? A heavy dead body with no counterpart in music. In color? Hues of death, but Ophelia is gone, Ophelia doesn't. Life is all around us. Our souls finally mirror each other. We also belong.