I sought her on north-eastern Scottish shores on clear winter nights, the salt-encrusted wind from the sea enlivening my hope. I sat in an isolated candle-lit café in Iceland, nursing my hope in cold hands cupped round hot chocolate, massaging my stinging eyes at midnight, smiling at the sleepers slumped over tables around me. We lay on the deck of a ship off the coast, my love and I, our hope snug within our survival suits, laughing at how surreal it was to lie there under glittering northern stars. So many times, my long-held hope was disappointed, dissolving into the moment instead, into the darkness and the elements, and the joy of being alive.
It was on that night, not long ago, that alchemy swirled in the air; I had followed the charts, read the signs, and the skies were clear. The sun set in gold, and the crescent moon cradled earthshine in her arms as darkness crept enticingly slowly across the late spring sky. Hope pulsed in my veins.
Visceral it was to see her at last: Aurora in angel form, hovering in the fathomless height of heaven. She streamed over the whole northern hemisphere that mild May night, and yet it seemed that she had come just to me, in south-west Scotland, to honour the hope I had held for years. Here she was on my doorstep, blessing, teasing, as if to say…‘I came looking for you’. Who would have thought it? She appeared in the midst of a heatwave in May.
Yet I found I regretted not one minute of those magical times I had hoped in vain. As my tears streamed beneath the shifting colours of her skirts, I recalled those freezing cold and far-off places where I had laughed, loved and learned on those nights when she veiled her bright face. Hope unfulfilled is hope poured instead into the joys of the present for the open, seeking heart.