The Twilight Refuge

South.

There is, practically, no sound.

Only the redundant rustling of bushes in perfumed temperatures and the swirling of fine sediment layers. The sun is high and there is enough light. The absence of light constrains our hearts.

While I tried to look at you as I knew how, still dormant like the doubtful verb of tomorrow, you decided to sing me the melody of when we were still small birds dreaming of becoming people, sitting among the reeds by the riverside, tossing little bits of gravel onto the crusted, wan blanket that encircled our ankles with beads whenever we loosened the faded sandals bleached by the western breeze.

You reminded me then that the impact of those tiny limestone scraps on the stream, half-dry and sprinkled with pale brambles and pampas branches, showed us the multiplication of stars by the second.

Like small explosions of light orbiting what we always called our twilight refuge.

Our future home in the rocks, to be realised in the limestone hills, resting on the swift passage of old days through limestone and schist textures, carving trails and granite memories.

It was my turn to hold your hand and force you to drench the roots of a hope suffocating in stagnant water where it had made its home. As the sea pounded the coast, each breaker wiped out by the one that followed — never by accumulation, never one wave trying to build itself into another — I carried your fingers as the river carries a boat.

And I asked you, softly, if part of the essence of time is change, how can everything turn to nothing in so little time?

The waters do not change as the land changes; they do not lie. Let us ask the sea what it can promise us and it will say that the mountain always rises before the noblest of disappointments, like a lighthouse, to remind the night that the innermost arid earth will exist forever, even if it floats tethered to a small wooden hull studded with longing.