Valley

“That’s what I wanted tonight,” the young man watches traffic stop as she crosses the street, “I wanted to lean over the boat and slit the rope from anything else besides this.”

She smiles to him with an open glance that he studies in all shades of light from the shops they pass that wash over her.

“There’s writing – where I have the pressure to improve, and work – where I have to perform, and even by myself – I become my own critic.” He looks with vigor toward her, “But this – this is dynamic.”

“I looked forward to this," she whispers, "but I felt bad because it’s right before I leave.”

“But that’s good – that’s exciting.”

In two days she’ll be on a flight back halfway across the country to live out semesters of her life that are left wide open to the will of God.

At her car, he hugs her with the grip of months since, and leaves a store for the months left until they see each other again. His hands fall to his waist side first, but hers tremble from their grasp to the material of his jacket.

“Is this locked?” He stretches around her for the door. It is.

He fades from the light of a nearby restaurant into the cold of a clear winter night.

In between them both was a passion to commence in a relationship they both had seen at arm’s length for the past year. Her move to study across the country put itself up against all reasonable hope and left them to live on the surface when together – with slivers of explosive light to slip from within them to acknowledge the other’s feeling.

When alone, the imagination of this relationship working out plays itself an exploratory plot line and holds them over where possibility may lay ahead or just be – for him – a scene to write about. That’s all it is for me.