So Many Ways to Begin

Every step of the road was just as she'd dreamt it all the time she'd been away. Every step took her further away from the smoke and the noise and the loneliness and fear of the city she'd left behind. Every step drew her deeper into the hollows of the landscape, the green hills and shining rivers and mist-tangled treetops.

they were happy, in the ordinary ways which had evaded them for so long.

brief dry kisses, hugs, little more – would be swept aside in a hurried series of remembered moves and gestures.

Lives were changed and moved by much smaller cues, chance meetings, overheard conversations, the trips and stumbles which constantly alter and readjust the course of things, history made by a million fractional moments too numerous to calibrate or observe or record.

They were both so much older now. Their bodies had crumpled and softened and worn,

Your children grow into adults, and they leave, and they make a life of their own. It’s the way the world turns, he said.

in the way her long thin fingers fiddled with a sugar cube, in the way she held his eye when she spoke, in the way he wanted to reach across and tuck a stray wisp of hair back behind her ear.

It was something, he was sure, he would be capable of tearing flesh from bone to defend.

Standing close to each other, intimately close, blind to anyone else, their world reduced for the moment to this self-enclosed space of anger and resentment and shame.

hollows of the landscape, the green hills and shining rivers and mist-tangled treetops, as though she was clambering into the postcard she used to keep propped up on the mantelpiece

unspoken regrets and recriminations swept out of sight like crumbs from the table, silence blanketing the room, the two of them avoiding each other’s eyes.