Categoria: English Stories

“There we two, content,
happy in being together,
speaking little,
perhaps not a word.”

Walt Whitman, “A Glimpse”

I breathe in the scent of roses and close my eyes. Kneeling at the edge of this artificial pond, I feel the small stones pressing into my skin through the fabric of my dress, and find myself smiling. The warmth of spring fades as memories surface, carrying me north, to the shore of another lake, where snow-covered mountains, rather than leafy willows, framed the star-filled sky.
Time passes without meaning. I could not say how long it has been since that night.
It feels as though it happened not months, not years, but centuries ago.
And yet it feels like yesterday.
Still. Always.

It was sunset. Late summer had melted the snow around the lake, revealing green meadows scattered with flowers, sloping down to the stony shore.
My hair was loose, and I wore a light dress, something I was not used to, having spent my life among perpetual snow. I remember taking off my boots and walking barefoot into the water. It was still cold enough to steal my breath, and so clear that I could see the smooth white stones on the lake bed. The light was still warm, orange against the evening sky, making the shadows of the mountains tremble as they lengthened across the still water. Only the song of thrushes nearby disturbed the stillness. With my eyes closed, I breathed in the faint scent of resin, just as I breathe in the roses now.
Nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed.
I am alone now, too.
Back then, you were there.

I heard the gravel crunch beneath your shoes and smiled, without turning, without opening my eyes. I remember you embracing me. I leaned back against you and let my shoulders relax against your chest. That was how it was then.
I tried not to move, not to break the rhythm of my breathing, which had so easily fallen into step with yours.
But it was impossible.
Stillness had never been an option, under any circumstances. So I drew away, turning within the circle of your arms, and smiling was, for both of us, the only thing that mattered.
Smiling, and reaching for one another, with something uncertain and urgent between us, as though kissing were both forbidden and necessary.

And finally, in the intertwining of our fingers, were all the things we could not say and might never have found a voice for.
But it did not matter.

We walked, I remember.
We walked slowly, never moving far apart. I was still barefoot, and the stones grew colder as night fell. You kept your head bent to look at me, heedless of where you placed your feet. The sun was setting, and the mountains’ long shadows darkened into something almost solid, a dense substance stretching across the water until it touched our solitary figures.
I walked beside you, looking into your eyes, unaware of the darkness gathering around us. I cannot say what we spoke about. Perhaps everything, perhaps nothing.
I may not remember the words, but I remember your voice: low and warm. When we were together, it lost its usual edge and softened in a way perhaps known only to me. I remember it with the calm familiarity of the memories we hold most dear. Even now, I seem to hear it on the spring breeze, mingling with the rustle of the willows, murmuring among the petals of newly opened roses.

I open my eyes and see the carefully tended banks of the artificial pond. No mountains close off the horizon, only the walls beyond the trees. My hands tighten around the fabric of my dress. Instead of the light silk of that summer, they find something rougher, worn thin by time.
As reality comes back into focus, the memory begins to slip away.

I hesitate, then relax my fingers and lace them together, remembering the touch of your hands on my skin and the beat of your heart, slow, steady, reassuring. Later, as the last glow faded, we sat in each other’s arms and watched the water darken. When the moon rose above the snow-covered peaks, its reflection lit the mountain basin that cradled us and spread across the still lake, so broad and bright that the reflected stars began to fade.

We lay down and watched the constellations struggle against the moonlight, without saying a word. We lay close together, your arms around me, my head resting in the hollow of your shoulder, a place that seemed shaped around me and had always felt like home.
That was how we fell asleep.
That was how we woke in the first light of morning.

How many nights have passed since then?
How many more times did we fall asleep together, letting the day’s troubles fade, along with the demands of lives so different, so consuming?
Many, someone might say.
Not enough, I would answer.
I do not remember them all, any more than I remember every morning we woke together.
I remember the last one, in our room: a small, quiet bedroom in a house at the edge of the woods. The scent of wild roses drifted into that room. Even through the closed door, we could hear the fire crackling in winter and the children’s slow, even breathing in the room next door. A morning like so many others, the first golden light brushing the pillows and our closed eyelids.
A morning of smiles and unfinished sentences. There was no need to finish them.
A morning of familiar gestures and familiar sounds: floorboards creaking, a shutter thrown open by the spring wind, laughter, the scent of bread and fruit as we spoke about the day ahead.
A quiet morning.
Now, alone on this silent shore, I remember the shadow the closing door cast across your face, clouding your gaze for a moment.
Do I truly remember it?
Or has everything that happened since darkened the images I carry, changing that last morning forever, before the explosion and the ash shattered everything we knew? The door you had closed with such care, to keep part of your heart safe, stood wide open.
The empty house hollowed out a space inside me that I could never fill.
And in the desolation that followed, even you could not have filled it.
You were gone.
Only the memories remained.

But now, on a spring night, at the edge of a pond too small and too shallow, I choose to watch the moon’s reflection on the water and lie down beneath the flickering stars.

I return to you, to that night on the shore of another lake, and feel the hollow of your shoulder beneath my head.
Closing my eyes, for a moment I am home again.