Amber Dream

III.

Until they became students of English, in the same university, and the same residence; Then, Sara started to hurt Flore’s love. In childish adoration, Flore would knock a thousand times at Sara’s door, hide herself and “boo” like a devil. Exasperated, Sara rebuked her.

For their master degree, they were writing together a memoir romantically entitled Secrecy and Fecundity in Blake’s poetry. Sara who had proposed the subject, suddenly unleashed her old demons of insecure jealousy: her mind sometimes felt like a hopeless void, and Flore wrote such a naively sensual and melodious English, stealing, so it seemed to Sara her very soul.

Gradually as she entered Flore’s room, Sara started to feel as estranged and helpless as with the others. One day Flore only spoke through a door obstinately kept ajar, she had turned stone-hard. Sara didn’t dare to insist. She rushed back to her own room in turmoil of frustrated anger and humiliation. What had she done to deserve this?

Sara spent the remainder of the day obsessively watching Flore’s window. Both girls lived under the roofs, on the 6th floor of that old Paris building, built in a semi-circle around a tiny inward garden, where a charming old-fashioned fish-shaped fountain spurted water into a small pond.

Usually the girls would love to signal and chat from their windows facing each other across the opposite wings of the building. This time Flore’s window remained ominously dark and obstinately closed.

The next day, her heart squeezed with anxious foreboding, Sara walked through the never-ending stretch of corridor separating both rooms. Her tentative knock at the door only met with a heavy unbearable silence.

At the end of her gloomy descent of the long winding staircase, the janitor at the reception desk told Sara Flore had definitively left.

So Flore had decided that Sara was to be dumped together with all those she condemned without appeal as “cold and insensitive”. Sara felt betrayed, of course she had such an ugly temper and was so imperfect, but in her clumsy, destructive way she loved Flore and would never have abandoned her.

How often Sara had tormented her dear Papa with her dreadful scenes, and the next minute she would kiss him, and everything would be forgiven. No, after all, it had not been that way with Flore! 

Sara struggled with an overwhelming confusion of guilt and anger. Whatever wrong Flore would have done to her, Sara would have confronted her, with that nasty, fiery temper of hers. Never would she have given up on Flore, so despisingly, not even deeming her worthy of an explanation or a “Goodbye”! For sure Sara would have forgiven Flore anytime, always did, the violent storms of her quick temper always subsiding into guilt, penance and everlasting love!

Even years later Sara would never be quite sure why Flore had vanished in that way, from one day to the other, never could find closure!

Was Flore just ashamed of giving up her studies? For sure Sara was a bit of an intellectual snob those days, but did Flore really believe her friendship was that flimsy?

Was it all about those childish games of hide and seek in the corridor, for which short-tempered Sara had lost patience, rebuking Flore’s exuberant love?

Only when Sara had somewhat mellowed with age, would it dawn on her, how could she have been so deaf to the voice of her guilty conscience, yes that must have been why!  She had once wounded Flore’s feelings badly, maybe irremediably, with a hasty, clumsy comment, she right away regretted and apologized for.

Since Flore is not a mere figment of imagination, more cannot be said about those painful events without betraying her even more unforgivably. Suffice to say that at that moment of ordeal, Flore was in need of compassion and not judgment!

Although Sara had hurt Flore more out of a silly impulsive misjudgment than intended meanness, Flore was justified not to forgive her easily. Indeed for passionate, intransigent Flore, forgiveness did not come easily. But wasn’t Flore just as exacting and pitiless for others as she was for herself?

The Polonaise… Yes that was the quintessence of Flore, that memory of her irremediably lost friend playing Chopin in that tiny room of the Student community Centre! Sara would sit on the floor, under the piano, as she seemed to remember, or so close that her whole body would vibrate to the music!

_Oh Flore, go on it’s so beautiful!

_No, it’s no good, I can’t get it right!”

Again and again Flore would repeat inexorably the same two first measures, never did she once move beyond, so harsh was she on herself in her quest for absolute perfection, and no, clumsy Sara could never soar to such heights!

Memory of Flore’s surreal room forever flashing through Sara’s mind with vivid posters of “The Rolling Stones” literally from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling! Flore pointing at the sulky mouth of her beloved Mick Jagger:  “Did you see that bastard's sensual mouth!” she would exclaim, the inglorious epithet turning into tender compliment, while the room pounded with yet another illuminating motto of Flore’s life “I can get no satisfaction!”

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