The Painted Veil

I have just started to read The Painted Veil by William Somerset Maugham,it's a wonderful book. I saw the film too,so i am curious to make a comparation after i finished the book. I wrote a short story inspirated by the film. Here you go...

I guess i loved you – The painted veil

The thick morning mist was slowly dispersing, and the silhouette of the village started to become visible. The village was really only the silhouette of it’s own. It will wear the stamp of the cholera for a long time, just like those, who stayed alive. And Kitty will keep in heart those few monthes, which she spent at the edge of death. But still…it seemed for her, that she lived for the first time in her whole life.

She took a clean, white paper from her desk, a „tabula rasa”. And she was ready to write it down. Write down all, what she thought. What existed only in her mind. Those thoughts, which never really borned, which were not alive yet . She took her pen and started to write. She wrote vigorously, without stopping, like the words have been only waiting for this moment since a long time…to break out…

„I think I have to write. Not for the reason, to take it years later and it read it again like a diary, but to clear my mind. If only this is possible. It’s hard to draw up the sentences, maybe impossible. And now, when I write this down it seems to be ridicolous. What should I write about the things what happen with me day by day, what happen inside me, and which want to break out in any second. But I can’t let that. I can’t. I know, You wouldn’t want to see me like this. The question is, how long I can stand? Where is the limit which I cross and I feel like i’m going crazy. I can’t cry anymore, I don’t have more tears and anyway it doesn’t help on my soul.

Until now I have always thought in a bitter and ironic way, that if amour wouldn’t make a rhyme with toujours we would never have the idea to connect love and eternity. But now i’m here without You, and even a second seems to be the eternity. I have never thought that my soul will be able to find peace, and surely not next to You. Maybe it’s not exaggeration when I say, that I didn’t feel anything more than a tiny sympathy for You when we got married. So why I married You? Because I wanted to escape from the choking atmosphere of my parent’s house.

When You and I came here, I thought that the worst what can happen with me that I die. I survived and You didn’t…now I know that nothing more visious could happen with me, with us. Two hearts, two souls seperated, not long after they found peace in the mirror of the other. A future collapsed, which we just started to plan. Now i have to face with Your missing. Before we came here, to China, You always wanted to be with me, and I wished you wouldn’t. From now I live alone and love alone, and I scream that I don’t want it to be like this. But my scream disappears in the mist between the walls of this ghost city, like it would be only a whisper. In this place the value of the things are changing, and we learn to respect the joyful moments because there are just a few of them. And I can feel, that it will be even less now but I have to keep continue the way which is signed for me. I stand up and step forward. This child i carry under my heart conceived in the death and it will born in a new life. So today I touch Your microscope for the last time. I won’t take it out every day and let the veil of the past to cover my soul. This is a painted veil, full with emotions, tears and laughs, desire and despise. You and I painted it, this is the veil of our past which doesn’t have place in the future. As long as I am alive I won’t forget this veil, which i wear today for the last time as the sign of widowhood. I will pray for You every night, and I hope that You hear me before I fall asleep and whisper to Your ear: I guess I loved You…”

Kitty put down the pen and stared into space silently. She felt that her worried soul calmed down by the words she wrote down. She never wrote with passion like this. She knew that all she wrote it’s true. Her ship will leave tomorrow to London. She decided to go to the cemetery for the last time, to leave the painted veil on the grave…