like birds in summer
Seasons, now, are what are absent from her life, seasons and falling leaves (and leaves of any sort, really) and fires at night, curled up in wool blankets with a mug of hot chocolate or apple cider in her hands. Snow, too. And, indeed, the freshness of spring, the surge of new life. This is, after all, the land of eternal summer.
California is monotonous, relaxing, soporific, after the past eight years. She is a different person now, used to living without sleep and dancing along the edge of a crumbling precipice. She is used to seeing the sky through gaps in the ground. She must learn to settle.
She thinks, now that she has retired from public service (officially only, she is still serving the public in the private sector), she can resume her life and pick up where she left off with Danny. His curls are coarse, like gold-and-silver wire forged by some exotic god. They rub against her skin so unlike the smooth black locks that once slipped like glossy feathers through her fingers.
His lips are different too – far too different to erase those other aberrations, that perhaps, can be forgotten.
These are those aberrations:
The way his hands touch her (their hands are heavy, soft yet callused, light in their touch). The sound of his voice (sometimes it is as quiet as his, almost as gruff). The colour of their eyes (though sometimes, rarely, they have the same expression).
She has always loved men of words, and Danny, certainly, can spin tales and dreams and fantasies with the best of them. But they are only tales, flimsy and insubstantial in the light of day, not new worlds like the ones he used to create for her.
He doesn't write to her anymore, and the letters she has are from years ago, the paper worn smooth from her fingers and the passage of time. The ink, too, has blurred, leached into the pages topped, more often than not, by the Presidential seal. The strong penmanship speaks of passion and idealism and is completely incongruous to his signature on the birthday cards of the present. He is tired now; he does not have a place to rest.
His name, when she returns to the places and the people she has loved, flits from mouth to mouth like birds in summer. And indeed it is summer when she returns, when the heat in California becomes almost unbearable, when she goes to the cool utopia of the President's farm in Manchester, where she sips fresh cider in the early days of autumn.
He does not come to visit her in California. He does not fit in there, and he knows it, and so he stays away. She flies to him, visits him, going to his apartment, far from the madding crowd albeit still in the heart of their city – at least for that first year, she goes to him.
But he is not the only one she visits when she returns, and he does not join her in the reunion of their friends. It is self-enforced ostracism. He sees their friends when they come to see him; he will not impose his presence on anyone.
He goes home, after that first year, returning to the nest, so to speak. To New York, to Columbia, where he is offered a position lecturing. He is at home, there, in a way he never was in D.C. She sees the change when she goes to Manchester, two years later.
They are all there – Josh, Sam, Donna (with the new President now, and so proud, so proud); Congressman Will Bailey; Kate Harper, bestselling author; Charlie, now practicing law; herself and Danny. And him, of course, always – and yet it is a surprise to see him there, a surprise that he has been invited and, more so, that he accepted the invitation. But he can hold his head up high now, though he feels indebted to him, always. And to her, however inadvertently.
They don't speak much, then. After all, what is there to say? She returns to California, to her child, to her life, with the memory of him as he was imprinted on her brain.
He writes to her again, picking up a pen for the first time in years with the intention of creating a world just for her. The words are slow to come at first, then fly out of him, drifting across the page, the sharp edges and round curves for all the word like birds. And indeed the letter flies to her, up in the air across the states they so often visited during those years.
It is not a new world he writes for her. It is their old one, it is the place they return to after their long migration. They have been a long, long way away.