She pulled open the sliding glass doors, to feel. The wind running off the water, over the short back lawn, through the doors, and tussling the leaves of the menagerie of openned books, left stranded and marked up, strewn around the living room.
He played music, thumbing through the collections until he found something to his taste, set it spinning under the needle. How many days have we spent like this? She thought pulling back her long unattended brown hair.
She longed for a pair of sweat pants, but knew she would not change from the loose fitting unpatterned dress, she had long given up. That habit, for his penchant for formal dress- He went only so far as to discard the tie and unbotton the top button of his vest, shoes scuffed still worn made sounds on the arachic themed tile floor.
Ice into glass, and then a drink to sip. On he he dangled his drink and reclined into his chair, facing their sea. She poured into the chair near his, cocked at an angle so that ever out of the corner of his eye he could see her. Disobedient hairs teased by the wind. He sgain found himself smile at the sight of her heart shaped face, still so young, and her expressive straight eyebrows. Dark, her eyes impossible to read.
He looks old she thought. Hinged her leg over the brown leather arm of her chair. That drew an eye and she turned her head to smile at the oncoming plodding purple clouds. She would not share her little victories. He wasn't old though, not in the ways that mattered. Oh the grey had won the battle in his hair and beard, and there were laugh lines carved in to his face that had not once been there, or been there so well but in all the ways that she cared about he was as young as he had been all those years ago.
She heard it there, his youth, in the laugh that brought her back. When she asked what he was laughing at he responded with his all too boyish grin, 'You Bruja- it is always fun to watch you think.' She shot him her best scowl, which brought only another of those wonderful laughs.
It was as she wanted. Years ago infront of all those people she had told him, softly so that only he could hear -'They can all have the man you are, all I want for myself is the little boy you will always be.' He had promised her that. And kept it, and her, himself.
The song had changed. And drawn his eyes to the east. He was looking for a sun that could not be seen, she knew that. What quiet madness plagues him at this time of day? she thought, and thought she would never know.
She saw then a tear at his eye, which confused her. She asked what was wrong. 'This song makes me cry. Do you not remember where it is from?' She listened and could not place it, told him so. He told her from where it was and she then recognized. It was some song from a long ago TV show, one that had enthralled and haunted. Him in his youth, wide eyed and impressionable, and easily swept away by characters and stories and loss. He still was.
'Do you think it would have struck you without that show?' she inquired. He sighed, and held out his glass. Now just lonely cubes, waiting for the next inevitable deluge. She popped up and pulled it towards the bar behind them.
'You get old enough and there ceases to feel like there is a beginning and an end. It is all just one continiousness. It doesn't feel linear.' a pause. a sigh. 'I do not know what it did for me before, I do not know what it did for me after. There is no before and after anymore for me.'
He could feel one of those eye brows raise behind him. He could hear it in her voice when she asked 'what then is there if there is no before and after?'
There it was. Like the light that burns on the horizon after the sunset, in his voice. The little boy that would never grow, only one day die. The smile she wore was soft and sad after the words had set in.
'There's only now.' he had said.
She handed him his drink over his shoulder, leaned down to his ear. They looked out.
'No, there's not only now,' she said, he turned his head slightly to watch her as she looked into the silent raging, the divide between clouds and sea nearly indistinguisable, In the same soft voice he had heard so many years ago at that alter 'there is now' she said 'and there is always.'
