"Yes, Sylvia, something has definitely changed between us since those first days when we were in heaven together. It changed on the very day when those fences were erected that were not in our interest as human beings, which bound us with impotence. This tragedy happened, because the fences were created for imperial objectives, to keep us small and self-confined and in universal isolation, both in loving and in thinking. The validity of those fences has now been challenged, perhaps for the first time ever. A few courageous women have stepped forward and presented the challenge. Yes, something has been lost, Sylvia. Something limiting is gone, that shouldn't have existed in the first place. A hole has been poked through the 'iron curtain' that we had no right to erect against each other."

      I paused, nearly exhausted, searching for words. "Indeed, the world is scarier, Sylvia, when one lives in the open, unconfined, because now one is challenged to awake and reach for the sublime, just as we were challenged on the day we met. We faced that challenge with courage in those days. But we do so no more. We got trapped into a confinement along the way that we neither intended nor were aware of. We embraced each other tightly with a great joy and then moved to property lane, or should I call it, poverty lane? The property lane has been closed now, Sylvia, because no one can really live there. You are right. That part is gone. We should have never fallen for its mythology that encumbers life so severely. But, Sylvia, what really matters, what existed before we became entrapped into this inward looking thinking, is still there. That heaven is still open. Love needs to expand and become as brilliant and as wide as the sky is at high noon. That is what I propose to you. We have been incredibly blessed by the unfolding of love in our life. Now it is time to honor the great heart of universal love, our humanity, from which all love unfolds. This upward step is a necessity, Sylvia, because it honors the principle of love, which is a universal principle. Without embracing the Principle of Universal Love with gratitude we may loose whatever love we have in the small, because love is a universal principle and cannot exist in the small. And then without love, what do we have to live for?"

      Sylvia still didn't answer me further, or even attempted to. She couldn't. However, she didn't loose the faint smile this time. She couldn't deny what I said. Her honesty didn't allow that. Nor could she acknowledge it without having built the foundation for acknowledging the Principle of Universal Love herself, because moving forward without that foundation would unravel her safety net, which she regarded to be our relationship. It seemed that she needed that safety net for protection. Indeed, how could she let it go until the larger platform that was still but a faint hue of early dawn becomes established into an all-illumining presence?

      Great patience was evidently needed by both of us. However, we had moved far enough along the road in this hour to be able to leave the gallery's Black Room at last.



      Outside the Black Room the real world came in the view again. "Let's have lunch," I said, and reached my hand out.

      "No," she said, "I want to see the Majas on a Balcony once more.

      I followed her to the great paining at the far right of the lobby, a testament of Goya's capacity to evoke beauty. The painting is of two beautiful women, feminine to their fingertips with an air of mystery about them, and with two men standing behind them in the shadows, darkly dressed, one behind each of the women.

      "Who owns whom?" asked Sylvia after looking at them for a while. "Do the men in shadows own the women? They probably also own their fancy garments. Or the women own the men in real terms?"

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Stories about  Sex from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche