hopping scotch

The day he arrives, there is no storm or rain, neither does the sun shine radiantly. It is but a calm, cloudy day that makes her dream about leaping to the skies – reaching out for the talons of granite pigeons as they soar on towards another realm of thin air and blue beauty. But then the woman withdraws her arm quite reluctantly, folding it like an injured wing to her side. She waits on the top of the rocky structure, a memorial of what had once been a grand castle with people who must have been important and had owned imperfect families who they may have loved or hated– now reduced to rubbles of abandoned memory and ruins of history.

Every day she waits there after completing her duties; signing documents in the castle and making rounds in town – she sings and she sighs and she hopes and sometimes, she cries. She smiles in front of the children and their parents, and she does so fully and excellently it is like she is whole; but the fact is that she honestly isn't. Not without him sitting next to her on their broken monument.

She invests emotion into the flow of days, patience fuelled by the thought of pasts spent in the sand playing games and nights at a dinner table laden with a feast. She does not forget drawing circles in the sizzling grains and hopping on stepping stones over a dried up river filled with death and skeletons. She does not forget the pain and the excruciating march of time; she bides these days by listening to the stories the winds tell and the kind encouragement of the sands.

And when he finally appears in the whistling of the breeze and the applause of the straggly shrubs in the desert, she can't quite believe it. She assumes it is yet another one of her hallucinations; but those handsome eyes are too hazel, and that smile too sincere to be fake. The gloves of these hands are too worn and warm to be a figment of her imagination, and the grip the hug has on her body is almost possessive, so raw in capacity that it can only be human – she smells the nonexistent scent of rain in the comfort of his hair.

What finally convinces her he is real is the thankful kiss he inks onto her cold cheek.