We are home. Espania. Spain.
How perfect that the winds, the gods, the spirits have brought us to this place, and I feel it as I never have before. Home. With my wife, with Gabriella. I am completely hers. There is not one inch of me that she has not touched, held, healed, and I am content.
I am content to be hers and have her hold my everything. I trust her as I have never trusted anyone before and it is such a thing of freedom, such a lifting of heaviness from my soul. It sounds trite but it is the only way I can put it.
I love her completely.
Tomorrow I will show her the island and with it my sanctuary. I have never shown another living soul that. I suppose I have never allowed anyone this close, trusted anyone so totally, as I do Gabriella. If she has played me false, if this is all some trick of her magic, then I am doomed. But I think at this moment I do not care, for I do not care to live the life I would have without her.
I gave her a small token of my feelings tonight, very small. I was almost embarrassed at the trivial ruby stone set within the silver, at the smallness of its size. I did not tell her of the ring's history. I do not know exactly why, I tell her everything, and she has given me no reason to hold anything away from her. Perhaps when I take her to my sanctuary tomorrow I will tell her of it. It is the Sacred Lotus ring, handed down to me through my mother, the only thing I have of her, but that is not the most important thing about it. It was my father's. My real father's. A man I never knew, never was told anything of, and until the day before my mother's abandonment of me, I never heard or saw anything about him from her. That night, though, at the supper table, she pulled out the worn velvet pouch and put it on my plate, before we ate, saying only...."This was your father's. It is now yours. Open it later, we eat now." And that was that. The next day she left me and we never spoke of it again. I never saw her again.
I think I have dreamed of him, my real father. I think perhaps some of the things I have written in my journal, those things way in the back that do not seem to connect with this time and space, are possibly of him. But I have no clue, really. I have no name, no nationality, no face....and no memories. My father was Benito Santana, in all the ways that matter, save one. I was not of his loins.
That has never been a concern to me, until now. I did not think of it before I gifted the ring to my wife, but what if it has some evilness to it? What if he was evil himself? What if that was the reason my own mother never spoke of him to me? Or perhaps he was the opposite, a great man, greater than my mother could withstand. I know what she was. She was not.....great. She was a whore. A different man every night in her bed, in our home. Still, she was the only parent I had, the only mother. Until the day I did not have even her any more.
Well, what is done is done. I felt it right to gift the ring to Gabriella...and only now, only she....none of my other wives have ever worn it, have not even known of its existence.
Only Gabriella.
She gave me a ring in return. I am not sure how she did it, but she seemed to fashion it from the necklace she wears, one of sapphires, that she said her father told her was her stone. A stone of destiny, that is what a sapphire is. She placed on my finger a ring of one large sapphire stone, made from her own stones, and then kissed it. I was quite at a loss without words, for once in my life. Never has any woman in my life given me a ring, much less such a ring as this, made from their own stone. I have given rings to all those who had mattered to me, but not once has anyone given me one in return. Not even a wedding band. Gabriella now has given me two.
I am a very fortunate man indeed.
