Once again I walk in silent rooms and gloomy galleries. Dark portraits gaze from gilded frames at tragic ghosts who walk through walls in fruitless quest to escape this place of shuttered light and time forever stilled. 
Where memory waits to be recalled by those who must forget, I saw you for a moment in that place, waiting for a sign, but once again these silent rooms took you back inside.

Last year - or was it before? Somehow time removes the thread - I watched you in the golden room, the air ablaze with light from a thousand candles, tiny flickering tongues of flame and dancing shadows on the walls; the faded glamour of dusty crystal chandeliers and tarnished candelabra; a banquet for an unknown soul, a play performed behind closed doors in a room of memories never recalled.

Yes, I watched you glide among the crowds of laughing faces, clothed in clouds of chiffon and silk, shimmering wings of a beautiful angel not yet fallen; luminous, translucent, an aurora of golden light radiating from you like a Byzantine icon in that room of burning air. You moved among the swirl of bodies as they danced an eternal waltz, around and around and around...elegant men and beautiful women rotating so gracefully, as if they were planets orbiting a distant sun to the music of the cosmos. I took your hand and you whispered something I didn't hear in that golden salon of shadows and dance. The hours of the night passed by somewhere outside among the gardens and the fountains; we never saw the sunrise or daylight's brittle smile. 
And then you were gone. The candles began to gutter and die, leaving only trails of aromatic smoke that gradually filled the darkening room with a veil of grey, masking the memories of this night you left behind in ghostly shadows that haunt me once again. Was it last year, or was it before? Did your whispered words evaporate into silence before you even spoke? I only remember the memory but time escaped and left the room. 

Now, once again, as I walk the gloomy galleries, I hear the banquet and the music and the play performed again.
Once more I see you standing by the gilded mirrors; your refelection gazes back at me from another place in time, bathed in the faded hues of golden memories. Do you remember what you whispered on the night I held your hand? Do you recall the lilting music and the phantoms of the dance? Do you remember floating through the salons of the night, among the shadows of the Chateau and the fountains of the park? Once again I watch you walk away from the tarnished, faded mirror in its decaying gilded frame that held your gaze for a moment of infinity. This memory is not yours to keep, it is not mine to lose; this memory is not lost in time, it is our time recalled. 

Once again, I return to the dark corridors and silent rooms to perform the eternal waltz among the ghosts of tragic actors and faded mirrors of lost time.