Be faithful to the faithful

Outside the window, the wind howled, hurling handfuls of icy rain against the glass.

On evenings like this, reality feels fragile, and the boundaries between past and present blur, leaving room only for shadows and memories. I sit in an old leather armchair, watching the dying embers in the fireplace. My grandfather always spoke in a low voice, as if afraid of startling the ghosts that lurked in the corners of his study. He wasn't looking at me, but somewhere through the flames, and his usually clear eyes would cloud with sadness.

"You see, Alexander," he would begin, lighting his old pipe, "love doesn't always build houses. Sometimes it builds prisons. But the most beautiful ones are those in which we lock ourselves voluntarily."

He told me about a man named Julian. My grandfather knew him personally – or at least that's how it seemed, given the intimacy with which he described every breath of this man. He lived in an old house, whose bricks seemed soaked in the melancholy of decades. His apartment was average in size, but for him it became an entire universe.

Bright light never shone there. Julian preferred the dim flicker of lamps under heavy shades or the trembling flame of candles.
The tones of his life were nocturnal: deep indigo shifting to charcoal black, and the crimson reflections of the fireplace. Shadows on the walls lived their own life. When rain began to fall outside – and in his city it seemed never to stop – the droplets on the glass turned into fluid patterns, distorting reality.

Julian sat in the center of this silence, locked within the four walls of his voluntary exile.

The centerpiece of his room – his altar – was an ancient fireplace of dark carved stone. The logs always crackled with a peculiar sound, like a whisper or dry laughter. And above the fireplace, in a massive gilded frame, hung a portrait of a girl. Her face was the embodiment of tenderness and that elusive mystery that cannot be solved even by living beside it for a lifetime. Her chestnut hair was something incredible, and on her lips rested a smile – sad and knowing at the same time. Her eyes seemed to follow Julian's every movement, wherever he went.

Beneath the portrait, on the mantelpiece, was engraved in Latin: "Fac fideli sis fidelis."

"'Be faithful to the faithful one,'" my grandfather would translate, his voice trembling. "It wasn't just a motto. It was Julian's curse... He wasn't always a shadow of a man. In his youth, he was full of hope, kind and romantic. He was that quiet wordsmith who saw poetry in a dewdrop on an iron fence. And there was she – his childhood friend, his only friend, his air. They grew up in the same garden, shared the same books and the same dreams. Julian loved her with that pure, absolute love that happens only once. He was sure she felt the same – he saw it in the way her gaze lingered on him, in the way her hand casually touched his sleeve.

But fate is an architect with a cruel sense of humor. Eleanor's family went bankrupt, and the only salvation was to flee to another city. He begged her to stay, even just a little longer. Afterwards, he learned that she had married a decent man whom she had come to love deeply. A letter arrived – he was to come to the wedding.

On that day, Julian stood in the shadow of the cathedral, watching her emerge in a white dress that looked to him like a shroud. She turned around for just a second. Their eyes met. In that brief moment, there was everything: recognition, farewell, and a plea for forgiveness. From that day on, Julian never sought to meet her again. He locked himself in his apartment, deciding that if he could not belong to her in life, he would belong to her in eternity."

My grandfather described Julian's ritual in such detail that I could almost see it myself.
Every night, when the city grew quiet and the rain began its monotonous rhythm, Julian would sit down at his secretary desk. He would take thick handmade paper and a fountain pen. His handwriting was calligraphic, elegant, full of a passion he could not pour out in any conversation.

"My eternal Eleanor," began one of the letters. "Today I saw you again in my dreams. We walked along the riverbank, and you laughed – that same laugh that I keep inside me like a shrine. The world around me is empty, the walls press in on me, but as I write these lines, I feel the warmth of your breath. I am faithful to you. Faithful to every unspoken word between us. Time has no power over what I feel for you. This feeling is not pain; it is the form my heart takes to exist..."

He described in his letters their walks, the scent of linden trees in their garden, promised her that no other woman would ever touch his soul. These were letters of a great lover, masterpieces of the epistolary genre, soaked with sincerity that took one's breath away.

But Julian never sealed the envelopes. He had no address – or rather, he did not want to disturb Eleanor's peace, did not want to be a shadow in her new, proper life.

When the letter was finished, Julian would walk to the fireplace. He would stand for a long time, gazing at the portrait. Eleanor smiled down at him.

"Fac fideli sis fidelis," he would whisper.

And then he would hold the sheet to the flame...
The fire would gently accept the paper. First the edges blackened, curling as if in pain. The flame greedily devoured the words of love, confessions, vows. The letters flared brightest at the moment of their death. Julian watched this process with a stony face, though a fire reflected in his eyes. His love turned to ash and smoke, rising up the chimney into the cold night sky.

For him, fire was the only purifying force. He believed that by burning the letters, he freed his feelings from earthly defilement. Thus love remained pure, untainted by reality, demanding no answer. It was a sacrifice on the altar of fidelity.

Years passed. Julian aged, his apartment grew layers of dust and memories. He became almost transparent, like the shadows in his room. His vigils by the fireplace grew longer, and his letters grew shorter, yet they contained more meaning than all the books in the world. On one particularly cold night, when frost painted patterns on the windowpanes, Julian felt that the fire inside him was dying along with the fire in the hearth. With a trembling hand, he wrote his last letter. It contained no memories. Only one phrase:

"I kept my promise. I was faithful."

My grandfather said that Julian held this letter over the flame for a long time. His fingers nearly touched the coals. For a moment, a desire flared in his soul to send it, to cry out to the whole world about his pain, to make her know that he had lived this empty, beautiful life for her.

But he opened his fingers...
The last sheet fell into the fire. Julian sank into his chair, gazing at Eleanor's portrait. He thought he saw her nod to him. The inscription "Be faithful to the faithful one" gleamed in the last glow of a log... He was found a few days later. He sat in the same chair, calm and peaceful, with a faint smile on his lips. The room was cold, the fireplace long since cooled, but the portrait still hung in its place, guarding the peace of its eternal guardian.

My grandfather fell silent. His pipe had long gone out, and a silence settled in the room, broken only by the ticking of the old clock.

"You know," he said softly then, "many will say that Julian was mad. He wasted his life worshipping a ghost. But I think he was the happiest man I ever knew: he found a way to love so that love could not be destroyed by daily routine, betrayal, or time."

I pondered this story for a long time. Years passed, my grandfather passed away, and that old apartment of Julian's long since changed hands. But one day, as I was sorting through old books in my grandfather's study, an envelope fell out of a yellowed volume of Latin poetry.

There was no address on it, only a name: To Eleanor.

The envelope was sealed with wax, but the edge was scorched. As if Julian at the last moment had snatched it from the fire and hidden it – not for her, but for someone who would find it an eternity later.

I walked over to my own fireplace and looked into the flame.

What does true love mean? Julian taught me that sometimes the highest expression of feeling is its concealment. To sacrifice one's presence in the life of a beloved for the purity of that feeling – that is true fidelity.
We live in a world where everything must be put on display, where love is measured by words spoken aloud and by photographs in frames. But Julian's story reminds me of silence. Of letters turned to ash. Of shadows that hold more truth than the bright light of day.

I threw the unopened envelope into the fire...

Let it go to him. Let in that silent world where Julian and Eleanor, perhaps, are finally walking through the garden of their childhood, he reads this letter aloud to her.

"Fac fideli sis fidelis." Be faithful to the faithful one.

I closed my eyes, and I thought I heard the crackle of logs in that distant, nocturnal apartment, and saw the ashes of a great love rise toward the stars, turning into eternity.