i'm feeling romantic

He walked through a open gate and into the garden of an aging senile woman. She could hear him coming but even in the deep recesses of her mind the glimmer of hope had gone out and she did not even recognize the soft voice he had once used to tell her all the dreams he had for them. Nor did she smell the scent of starched linen and musky aftershave that had once been her aphrodisiac. All the former light had gone out of her eyes and what was left behind was the constant welling of tears she could no longer cry. Her broken heart reflected in her cracked and failing mind, filled with thoughts of half remembered evenings at a cabin on the lake or a summer spent driving through the country for no other reason than to find the most delicious honey. Even in that quiet, wild flower garden with nothing but the birds chirping and the breeze stroking the leaves on the poplar trees, the old woman could not hear the man's desperate pleas for forgiveness. His straining voice trying to will her mind into the present. But the woman's heart had closed and she could no longer grasp at the tiny morsels of love he had come to offer. The only way that she could see to face each sunrise was to allow her mind to remember a time that was not so complicated, a time when her heart had burst wide open and was bleeding for all to see. The denial of a present reality had taken a toll however and for that tears welled in her eyes. Tears for all the lost time and for the life she had once found such delight in. It seemed, for the man, that she was suspended in her grief and that if only he could remind her of some small detail of their past love, some small token he had given her or the name of a neighbour's cat she had once fed that she would fall away from her despair and come back to him. It was this blind hope that had led him into her garden. For it was this common blindness that bound them, the woman's blind denial that this man would ever love her again and his blind refusal to believe that she was all but lost to her memories. And so theirs was a blind love that waded through time each waiting for the other to recover their sight.