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I looked up.
I looked up for no reason that I could later remember. Perhaps there was a curious sound from a garden, the voice of a bird or child that lifted my interest. Perhaps a breeze blew close, and I wished to lift my face toward it. Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter.
I looked up from my monotonous work. Yes, even I know it to be so. Dreary, boring, tedious, unrewarding, eye-twitching, monotonous labor. Perhaps that in and of itself inspired me to turn away from it for a moment.
Whatever it was, while I was sitting slouched in an armchair on the begonia verandah somewhere between summer and spring when the days were still hot but the nights cool, I looked up. There is a stair down from the verandah that leads to a stone path that leads in turn to the main thoroughfare of Imladris, the White Road. It was to the little path that I looked, a cobblestone trail lined on either side in tall hedges skirted by cheerful little flowers and overhung by green curtains of all manner of trees.
I looked up. I remember feeling my hair shift away off my face, blinking against the bright sunlight, stretching the crick from my neck. To see him there.
Glorfindel is a person I’ve seen near everyday of my life in Imladris. He comes and goes with his men and sits proud and quiet at council when he attends. He hunts in the winters to bring food to our tables, and in the spring we bend over along with the rest of the masses in the little rolling fields, sowing the seeds that will bring us our meals, and in the autumn we harvest with the rest. We work together and though I see much of him, I have never known him as I did in that very instant when I chanced to look up and see him.
He was walking toward me on the path. His boots were quiet on the cobbles, his green hunting outfit blending against the hedges so that his face and hands were starkly outlined. His gold hair moved in the breeze, and as he passed under the canopy of crossing branches, golden patches of sunlight moved over him.
He caught my eye in that moment. I saw into him in a way. Saw a certain sorrow I’d never noticed before, saw a weary age to his soul, as if it was a dusty thing he paid little attention to anymore. Quite like myself, I thought.
I looked up and saw him, tall and proud as always, but newly beautiful to my eyes, and sad and old. I vaguely wondered what I looked like to him, though knowing I couldn’t be half so magnificent.
He took only enough notice of me to brighten his façade so that his mouth was not so much a frown as it had been. When he came up the steps, I thought I heard the rhythm of the ocean’s waves in his footsteps. He did not slow as he passed by me, but inclined his head. “Counselor.” Such a strong voice should not tremble so.
I had neither moved nor spoke. I still sat, staring at the pretty path before me, as the wake of his passing washed over me in breeze tainted with fruit. So he’d been walking in the orchards, or at least passed through them.
Somewhere inside me I shuddered. And turned my eyes again to my dreary labor.
I suppose there have always been these days, not just for me, but for everyone, when you look up and see something so familiar that you suddenly see it new. It can be exhilarating or frightening or both. I met my particular revelation with some resistance. How silly of me. I only realized that Glorfindel was not who I thought I was, and what did that mean to me?
It did mean something. But I suppose I shan’t be privy to what it is for a while yet. After all, I only just looked up.
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The End