The motorway had seemed cruel then, slicing through the fields like a wound. An open gash splitting muted green into a severed half. An apt indictment of humanity, she had thought.
Later, as the sun shrank further into itself and was replaced by rain, and the wide lesions of the black tarmac shrank into the narrow slices of the lanes, there was more clarity. As if, somehow this is how it should be. The tumbling stones that separated nature from man were grey, damp, not black as she had thought they might have been; the remains of a past slowly being devoured by the grass and the trees and the wind. Surely, they should be black. But still, she thought, this is how it should be, the balance of all things.
He had leaned over then, just as they passed under the eaves of an overgrown ash tree, he had held her tiny hand in his oversized paw, as if he had heard her internal monologue. As if he too had recognised the equilibrium surrounding them.
This was, officially, spoken out loud, their “first” date. It seemed official. No longer just two people colliding with the universe, bouncing in the wind like evicted leaves. There had been time spent, huddled in the corner of a darkened bar, surrounded by friends and acquaintances; words unspoken. Fleeting glances. They had learned to read each other within and between the lines of the other. Defined themselves within the comfort of a crowd.
He had visited for clandestine coffee. Returned like the moon in the dead of night, after the last footsteps had trodden their way home from the local pub. They had had many moments such as these.
But, this was their first official “date.” And it was raining. Is that significant? The rain? Was it a sign or simply just the nature of Great British weather? How many other first dates had taken place in the wet, wind-swept landscape? And how many had survived?
They had walked through the town then, hand in hand, as if this is the way it had always been. He had shopped with her, kindly, thoughtfully searching out a gift for her best friend, as if he knew her, had met her.
They had eaten in a local pub; the kind where workmen and pensioners culminate for Cribbage and heavy tankards of oak-barrelled bitter. The carpet, once red, was dull and bald, worn down by the heavy tread of work boots and walking sticks. Tables wobbled unrepentantly—wood cracked and stained with rings of white beer. It was whimsical to her. She could trace the ancestry, the shared secrets white circles forever ingrained on broken tables, like a magic spell waiting to be incanted.
On the shelves, books, for sale. She had liked that. The bartender melted into the wood; inconspicuous, old. Her words blunt—a testament to the hard graft of a cold northern life. There was no need for pretty words here, there was a job to be done. And done it would be without suffering the pain of small talk or unnecessary chatter. She had liked that too.
She had also liked the way his arm felt against her head as they waited for their food—as if this is the way it had always been.
It scared her then as they walked back towards the car park; how easy it had become to be around him. The comfort of it. And all the way back in the car. The same nagging doubt, the same scared child—abandoned for the final time before she had hardened herself to the world, to people and their careless propensity for betrayal. Did she dare?
And so it goes. The second date melted like candle wax… into the third and the next… into unnamed outings until she became part of a pair.
The half of another.
Wow Celia this is an absolutely beautiful story. I loved the images you invoked. I’d love to see some more like this!