One was older, the remaining dark in his wavy hair like the wild sea obscured by foam. The other was younger, but stooped slightly and had unnaturally bright eyes. Day after day, week after week, they passed each other in silence on their well-worn routes. Of course they glanced at each other discretely, but they carefully avoided making any direct acknowledgment over the rows of gravestones and tombs that separated them.
They were two men filled with grief, politely feigning ignorance of the other's presence. Neither remembered who had started it all, which of them had first squarely met the eye of the other. Was it was the older or the younger that had made some motion or sound? Perhaps it didn't matter.
They were careful and hesitating in the beginning, afraid of intruding on another's pain. They did not speak every day, and when they did break the silence, sometimes they talked of the weather, or of politics. Other times they delved directly into loss. Sometimes they did not speak and sat in mute understanding.
And then came the day when the elder did not venture out to the graveyard. His joints were stiff, and his wife would surely know that he continued to love her from his apartments as much as he would from the cold and wet graveyard. He did not ask himself if there was some other motivation.
The pounding on his door was insistent but was somehow not startling. He did not ask how the desperate, wild-looking man had found him, but simply drew weeping younger man into his arms; he knew all too well the deep ache of loneliness, guilt and betrayal. And when his hands tipped back the head of the younger man and his thumbs gently wiped the tears away, he saw in those eyes a mirror of himself. And when his lips met those of the younger man, it was like reclaiming all he had been and all he wanted to be.
As he did not ask any reasoning of himself, he never asked the younger man what it meant to him-- a sense of healing, a time of forgetting?-- these were questions that were better left un-asked. It was enough that the desperate passion they found together erased the ghosts of the past and gave hope for the future, however temporarily. And sometimes, in the quiet dark, the young man reached for him first, and that was enough.