1.
He played the piano in a cabin by the sea.
She lived in a cottage in the mountains and painted wild landscapes with gaping precipices and wintry peaks.
The two of them never met – yet they both knew each other better than they knew themselves.
2.
He got up every morning before dawn and went outside to listen to the waves crashing against the shore and the gulls calling overhead. They told him about loneliness and longing, about kingdoms lying beneath forgotten seas, sailing ships, and hidden creatures that swam the dark oceans and never came to rest on any shore. He wove these melodies into his songs: the crying of the gulls, the lullaby of the waves, the voice of sirens that came to him in half-remembered dreams.
She would leave her cottage soon after the sun came up. It was the hour of glinting dew drops and new-born flowers, of foxes hurrying back to their lairs after a night of hunting, and curious deer peering from behind ancient trees. If she looked carefully, she could spot the King of the Forest lurching through the woods in a shape that was half-man, half-tree. He often appeared on her canvases, along with dancing dryads and falling autumn leaves, and Mother Winter carrying her bag of snowflakes on the first day of December.
3.
He once told his best friend that he was not actually composing music. The song already existed: in the rain, in the wind, in the ever-sighing waves. The sea had its own language, he said, and the only way people could understand that language was through music. He only gave the world what was already there.
His best friend listened and nodded sagely, and then he returned home to his crowded city and his car and his office job and thought how much people could change if they were left to their own devices, living like hermits so far from the real world.
She once gave an interview about her paintings and spoke about a hand guiding her canvas. She wasn’t painting the pictures. Rather, the pictures were painting her. Every stroke of her brush deconstructed and remade her, killed her and gave birth to her again. She was what the mountains wanted her to be.
The reporter drove away from the mountains, thinking of her article, where she would mention the effect isolation had on artists and whether it didn’t reflect a disconnectedness from modern life to still paint pictures about mountains and nymphs and lonely forests.
4.
One day, he sat down in front of the piano. The new song had come to him in the depths of the night, and he could not wait to give birth to it. But when he started playing, he could not hear the waves, or the wind, or the mermaids. Instead, his song spoke of mountains that reached the sky and everlasting snow and the rustling of leaves on bright autumn days.
The very same day, she went out to paint. She painted all day and half the night, even though the light was gone. Her canvas surprised her. In front of her loomed tall cliffs and mountain deer and twisted fir trees, but her canvas showed nothing of the kind. Instead, she had painted a stormy sea, and a ship braving the tempest, and an island beckoning to it in the distance.
5.
A week passed. A month. Two. Little by little, he forgot the language of the sea and turned completely to the melody of the mountains, which he was not supposed to know or to be able to understand. He did not know what was happening. Only that he was becoming more and more dissatisfied with the cries of the gulls, the lamenting waves, the faint voices of sirens in the watery depths. He had never been discontented before, had laughed at the notion that an artist needed longing to create. But now all his creations came from longing.
Seasons changed quickly in the mountains, each with its own colors and patterns, its changing leaves and its dancing gossamer. Her paintings held nothing of that in them. She looked at the sun shedding blood on the snowy peaks and felt nothing at all. The moon bathing her glades in its cold blue glow and calling dryads to dance in dizzying circles no longer moved her to tears. What she wanted was the sea: blue and vast and unfathomable. For the first time in her life, she woke up in the morning and said: I do not think I am happy.
6.
He knew what was happening. He was dreaming someone else’s dreams – hearing someone else’s songs. They were beautiful songs, poignant and strong, reaching for the starry skies. But they were not his thoughts. They were not a part of him, they had not been with him in the darkness and the storm, in the light and the sunny breeze.
She woke up one morning certain that she was seeing through someone else’s eyes. She had never felt drawn to the flat sandy lands and the endless blue-grey mirror of the sea. The visions were not unpleasant, but she wanted her own sight back. She wanted the keen ambition of the mountains, the aliveness of the summer glades, the arcane dances in starlit groves. The solemn melancholy of the implacable sea, with its shipwrecks and its sunken islands could never be for her.
7.
Days passed, and although he tried to bring the sea back into his songs, he could never capture it quite right again. The waves felt too loud to him, the cry of the gulls too jarring. The calls of the sirens menacing instead of enticing. His songs were turning into something they had never been. There was a longing in them that brought tears to his listeners - the deep and melancholy love for things forever beyond reach.
In the following months, she firmly imposed on herself to paint only the mountains. No seas or distant islands for her. She frowned at the pictures. They were as alive as ever, but now she saw the flaws in her landscapes. The precipices spoke of death. The forests, of isolation that brought one to one’s knees. The fairy dances were a delirium that should not have been witnessed by mortal eyes. Her paintings had become something dangerous. Those who viewed them came face to face with the unknown, with fears and nightmares they did not know they had. They yearned for the stern, perilous slopes, for the image of the unattainable that now revealed itself to them on her canvas.
8.
One day, it all came to a head. He decided such a life would no longer do. He had to completely erase the mountains from his mind. He had to see them for himself, take in all their sounds and their shifting music, and then forget about them for good. So he got into the car he had not used in years and drove away.
That very same day, she was finally ready to follow through with her plan. She would go to the seaside and take in its landscapes and paint everything she saw there. Then, she would cast the painting into the dark stormy waters and ask the sea to release her from its spell. She walked down the path from her house to the nearest bus station, and those that saw her and recognized her wondered what she was doing there, the recluse painter who never came down from her mountain.
9.
He drove the car towards the mountains, stopping once or twice. On the way, he passed a bus going in the opposite direction. He glanced almost in passing, curious to see what was in the faces of the people who lived in the mountains and if it was their songs he had been hearing. His eyes met that of a young woman, or at least he thought her young. But in her eyes he could see snowy peaks and starlit groves and the King of the Forest lumbering clumsily through the woods.
She noticed the gaze of the young man in the car. Their eyes locked and her mind was filled with song: roaring seas, vengeful waves, sirens crooning in the distance. The song of the sea, she thought, and shuddered, because she had been right: nothing that came from the sea could belong to her.
The exchange of glances was brief. The car sped by, the bus followed its own course, and the two walked out of each other’s stories.
10.
There is a world out there where maybe the story goes differently. The two meet. They talk. They discover the songs and images that reside in their minds. It is a meeting of minds and a meeting of souls. A connection between mountain and sea, between song and image, and it creates the perfect picture and the greatest music and the most enduring of loves. You can keep this ending if you wish.
Or you can read on.
11.
The truth, then. The truth is something different.
He drove until he reached the mountains. He even found her cottage, but since it was locked, he could not go inside. Instead, he headed into the forest and found a glade where she often liked to sit and paint or simply soak in the image of sharp peaks and silver snow and dark forests. He closed his eyes and listened to the songs of birds that were not gulls. He heard the rustle of leaves and a wind that was different from his friend, the sea breeze. The song of the dryads had an ancient, frightening feel, unlike the familiar, seducing calls of the sirens of the sea. The King of the Forest whispered in his ear, but he could not understand the words. He listened to the song of the mountain, but there was no one close who could interpret it for him.
The bus took her all the way to the seashore. The bus driver told her that, if she wanted more directions, she could knock on the door of “that eccentric composer”. He had lived by the sea for years and knew paths and beaches and good places and dangerous places better than anyone else. But that eccentric composer was not at home. So she took in the sights of the sea all by herself: the gold of the sand, the silver of the waves, the ruby-like redness of the setting sun that turned the blue water into a sea of blood. She watched as night came, and stars lit up one by one, the same stars that guided ancient sailors on their journeys. But their ways were unknown to her, and the sirens would only show themselves in reluctant glimpses, and the sea was only a vast and forbidding emptiness in her mind.
They did not see each other on the way back. If they had, they might have understood that they had been meant to be each other’s eyes and ears, interpreters of each other’s songs and paintings, each other’s guides into new and unfamiliar words. What wonderful things they would have created then!
12.
He lived in a cabin by the sea and played the piano, and his songs echoed the waves and the storms and the stories of old shipwrecks and islands that are no longer on this earth. At times, the echoes of mountain birds and dancing dryads found their way in his song, glimpses into a world for ever longed-for but never reached.
She lived in a mountain cottage and painted images of tall peaks and snowy mornings and dark forbidding fir trees. In the corners of her canvases, one could sometimes spot the colors of the sea at sunset, or a sailing ship in the sky above the mountains, or a mermaid lost in the grassy landscape. Images of things that did not fit, for ever searching for a place where they could belong.
They once heard each other’s songs and seen through each other’s eyes. But they had never met, and they remained to each other a distant, unattainable dream, the last ray of sunshine on a forgotten sea, the sound of distant thunder above an unknown mountain.
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