Envoi

We packed the old, rusted blue car with apples and cheese, french bread and apple cider and drove it until the wind off the Pacific whipped our hair around us, forcing us into the shelter of the blanket we’d brought, though it was already April. 

I don’t remember the exact excuse, perhaps a penance, a meditation, a run up to the end of the earth to shout our burnt hearts into the blue deep of the sky upon the sea? 

All of that, perhaps, and the shared frustration of having known exactly where we’d each meant to go and yet now somehow to find ourselves not there -- nor ever able to again right ourselves onto those paths, mistaken though they may, and obviously now, were charted. 

What did it mean to stand next to you in that solidarity of helplessness? It meant something vast to me, but not only in that moment – in all the moments since, in the love we have found and held for one another, though not the kind of loves we’ve mourned then or since. 

I suppose it was that you were there with me – are here with me still – in the remembrance of that afternoon in the wind where there was nowhere further we could run, at the end of the lives we’d each imagined with others.

I would go there with you again, any time, and still do in spirit when things once more unravel. We were there together, and that’s more than enough; the ocean is ever deep and blue, the wind is raging and then capricious, the years pile up around our feet, then blow away to some other forever place where we might once again stand with one another someday.