Note: This was written to fill the prompt of "Let be, let be." I'm a bit scared to post this because the dozy embrace is one of the closest things that I have to a holy moment, so writing this for me was a very intense experience and sharing it even moreso. I also wanted to say that truly—I do NOT think I'm Proulx of that I fall anywhere even within the same universe as her talent, but that's how this piece wanted to be written.
Sleepless Dream
"I can't live like this anymore, Jack." The words were lost in Jack's coat, eaten up in time.
Nothing begun, nothing ended, nothing resolved.
What Ennis yearned for and suffered in a way he could neither name nor forget was that night from the summer on Brokeback, when he had come up behind Jack and pulled him close, the wordless embrace quenching a deep and resounding drought.
They had stood before the fire, its flames fighting to hold the dark at bay, the column of their shadows joined on the faded gray rock face. The ticking of the watch in his pocket anchored him closer, logs snapping and sparks flying skyward to catch the last bits of light. Stars replaced the sparks above the horizon. Ennis's head lowered slow and steady, he breathed Jack in, rocked against him in the faded reds and yellows and found himself humming, vibrations of the tuneless prayer like the heat of the fire and, standing there, fell into a dream that was not a dream but a sleepless and unspoken hope until Jack shifted and, Ennis, unaccustomed to speaking dreams said, "Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin' on your feet like a horse," and gave himself a shake, pushed away, and stumbled back into the darkness. His feet trembled in the spurs, the words "see you tomorrow," comforted by the catch denim on leather, the sound of animal on earth.
Later, that dozy embrace crystallized in his mind as the single moment in his life when the white was all pawed out, when the moon was lost and he and he and Jack were the only men on Earth, held in the spell of the fire and the stars, the wind on their faces and the mountain at their back. Nothing touched it, not even the knowledge nothing would ever touch it. And maybe, he thought, he'd never got much farther than that. Let be, let be.
