Chapter 77: I'm feeling so small against the big sky tonight

The farm is a mess.

As soon as he pulls up the drive, it's abundantly clear that everyone is going to have a fuck of a lot of work to do, and it's going to take a fuck of a while. Which Daryl fully expected - would have been shocked if it wasn't the case - but he still has to take a moment to just stand there with his hand on the open driver's side door, staring around at the damage.

Leaves and branches everywhere. A one of the old trees has fallen and is lying at the foot of its stump, itself, end pale and splintered like a compound fracture. The other trees have lost a good bit of themselves, though nothing nearly as bad. In the distance he can see slats missing from the paddock fence, and in the other direction it looks like those small gaps in the roof of the barn are a lot less small.

The house itself is mostly untouched. Like just about every other surface anywhere it's plastered with damp leaves, and they've stuck to the porch steps and the porch itself and scattered over every inch of roof he can see. High up, too, which is impressive, though still not all that surprising. But the windows are intact, pretty much everything is intact, and that's-

He sees it as he's walking a little way around the side, getting a better look at the barn.

Her trellis.

Flaking white boards are strewn all over this part of the yard. Bits of it remain, jagged shards like bone. Lines and angles, clear indicators of its ruined shape. He can see it as if it's still there; he can feel the roughness of it under his palms, how each time up it gave him at least one tiny but painful splinter like a toll he had to pay. He can feel it shaking slightly under his weight, supporting him but never particularly pleased about having to do so and always threatening to stop.

It's still there.

But it's basically gone.

He halts, stands, looks at it for a long moment. Something between his sternum and diaphragm feels like it's received a light but very pointed kick from someone wearing correspondingly pointed boots. An ache that flares and almost immediately subsides into blunt dullness. Lingers. He doesn't expect it to go anywhere for a while.

He never used it much. Only a couple times. But she did.

She used it a lot.

"It's a shame, isn't it?"

Daryl doesn't quite jump, takes half a second to be pleased with himself about that, turns. Hershel is standing just behind him, arms crossed, staring over Daryl's shoulder at what's left of the trellis.

"I know it didn't look like anything much, but it's been here forever. My mother used to have blue dawnflowers climbing it, almost to the window. They died right around the time she did." He shifts his gaze to Daryl, mouth tight. The sadness there isn't intense, but it's deep and it's old, and Daryl wonders just how much there is to this family that he doesn't and won't ever know. "You don't realize how much those little things mean until they aren't there anymore."

Daryl shoves his hands into his pockets, looks at it again. This is uncomfortable, but maybe not as uncomfortable as he would have expected - standing together and regarding this broken thing that Daryl has used in a way this man can't know. This broken thing he used to reach this man's daughter, to kiss her and put his hands on her and make her come for their first time in her own room, her own bed. This broken thing she used to sneak down to him, to wash him clean and take him into her and show him the world as he never would have believed it could be.

This broken thing he used to bring her a bouquet of roadside wildflowers, because he had to do something for her, because what he was feeling wouldn't stay contained behind his skin.

Maybe he could explain. Maybe he could explain all of it in such a way that this man wouldn't hate him for it. And all at once he remembers sitting in that soul-killing ER with Annette, so close to telling her and wanting to, needing to, so weary and so lost and just wanting to let it all go.

He didn't want to lie anymore.

"You could rebuild it," he says quietly, gaze still locked on it. That ache hasn't left him. It's nesting in him, clearing out some space for itself. "Wouldn't be that hard. I could-"

"No." Daryl can't see Hershel's slow, regretful shake of the head, but he can feel it. As if he can sense the displaced air on the back of his neck. "You're kind to offer. I thank you for it. But there's other things that need repairing a good deal more. I need you working on them. And..."

He's silent for a few seconds. Daryl already knows what he's going to say, understands it, doesn't blame him for it, but it at once deepens the ache and draws it closer to the surface, like one of those splinters slowly working itself free. And it's not about utility, about losing the use of something.

It's about losing the thing. The thing, and everything it is. Was.

Might have been.

"It's gone," Hershel says, voice even lower. Meditative. Almost as if Daryl wasn't there at all. "It wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be right. It should stay as it is."

You lose things. It's not cruelty. It's not unfairness. It just is.

Daryl nods, and when Hershel directs him toward the toolshed and the barn, he goes without another word.

Hershel has always worked him hard - not by any means unfairly, God knows the man has always been more than fair and even kind to him at times - but the rest of the day is some of the hardest work he's done yet, because it has to be done fast. The longer they spend on repairs and clearing away debris and fallen timber further out at the edges of the fields, the more all the work they would have to do as a matter of course falls behind. Hershel is clearly trying to strike some kind of unhappy medium, but it's taking effort, and after lunch Annette comes out in jeans and workboots to do whatever she can do.

And when Beth comes home she jumps into the fray as well.

She's everywhere, raking and carrying and fetching things, darting from place to place and doing whatever's immediately needed - a bright little bird flying through the last of the sunshine. Daryl follows her with his eyes when and where he can, but as on Friday there's nothing about it that's painful. There's no wrench of longing somewhere deep in the darker recesses where all the feelings he would rather not have hang out. He doesn't look at her and see - in the shadow of the beautiful shining collection of glass shards he once considered being in love - everything they could lose with one misplaced step along this edge they've sharpened for themselves. He looks at her and he simply enjoys what he's seeing: A lovely girl dancing along the boundary line between the child she used to be and the woman she's becoming - and in some ways already is and has been for a long time.

He looks at her as she comes to him in the shed to get a roll of heavy-duty trash bags, and as she leaves he follows the flash of her hair and the brass beads at her delicate wrist, the subtle dip of her waist flowing up into the even more subtle curves of her breasts, her hips and ass and powerful legs, and he just...

He loves her. It's that simple. It can be.

Under everything, waiting for him, it always was.

Dinner is breaded chicken cutlets - because it's fast and easy and everyone is starving to the point of getting snappish - and given that Annette has been working just as hard as anyone for two thirds of the day Beth offers to take over the cooking. Annette and Shawn have gone upstairs to shower and change and when Daryl comes in Hershel is seated at the kitchen table with a book in one hand and an enormous glass of water by his other. Beth is standing at the counter by the sink and doing the breading, Annette's ladybug apron tied around her waist, and when Daryl pauses in the doorway she looks over her shoulder, half turns, gestures with her knife at the pantry.

"Get me some corn, please, Daryl? Enough for everyone?"

He gives her a quick little nod and moves past her to do as she says, and he's three feet from the pantry door when her sweet, clear voice floats to him through the warm air.

forget the day you've had, forget the loves you've lived
you and I are famous for pretending to be kids
wash off all your grass stains, I'll pull off my shoes
let's love like we're kids, all shiny and new

"That's very pretty, Bethy." Daryl can hear Hershel's smile in the words, in her name - can hear that it's small and as deep as his sadness was. "Don't think I know it. Is that something of yours?"

"Oh- Yes, Daddy." And her smile? Not small at all. "Just somethin' I'm workin' on."

"Very pretty," Hershel repeats over the rustle of turning pages.

By the time Daryl returns with the ears of corn, he's managed to put his own smile safely away. Tucked inside, it curls around that nested ache and dulls it even further. Soothes. They lost a thing. But she's right here.

Girl.

On the phone with her later, going back over the day. Not him and not them this time but the farm, and in particular the tree that splintered and fell. All evidence of what it had once been used for rotted away and came down in various other storms years ago, but when she was much smaller Shawn made a knotted rope swing for her and hung it on a thick limb, because she loved the one at the swimming hole and she wanted a version for her very own. She used it almost every day for two years, wore the rope smooth at the knot and around the inches where she always settled her hands, and three years ago when sheer exposure to weather finally wore it thin enough to fall, she stood in the yard with Shawn and the tangled thing in her hands and joked about giving it a burial.

Then, after everyone else was in bed, she did. Little girl - not so little anymore, and far too big for that swing - in the moonlight in the backyard with a shovel in her hand, digging a grave for summer day after summer day like a murderer disposing of a body in secret.

She tells him this story with a smile in her voice, and he can tell she thinks it was silly, maybe even a little stupid - except she doesn't, and he doesn't think it was stupid either. Once he might have said it didn't matter.

It does matter.

"It's hard," she says after a short period of silence broken only by very faint phone-crackle. "Lettin' go. At least of stuff like that. I don't... Did you ever have this moment where you realized that nothin' was gonna last? That everythin' was eventually gonna go away or fall apart, or die, or somethin'- That it just wasn't gonna be there anymore?"

He's leaning back on the bed and toying with the wolf, turning it over and over in his hands and tracing the cool lines he now knows just about as well as the lines of his own body. Perhaps this conversation should bother him - certainly it's wandering into some decidedly melancholy territory - but it doesn't. Not very much. It's her voice and she's here with him, and for now that feels like the only thing that matters.

"I dunno. Maybe." Should he have? He doesn't remember a specific moment. Possibly there wasn't one. Possibly it was a long series of them, beaten into him in both figurative and literal senses. Standing with her in the ruins and looking around at the last of autumn, he'd thought about it and hadn't been able to think of anything then either.

"Seemed unfair," she says quietly. "Then I realized... Ain't like it's that way because someone decided to be a jerk about it. Ain't like that because God decided He doesn't like what He made. It just is. Nothing lasts." She pauses again, and he can hear the soft whisper of her sheets as she moves between them. Shifts her legs, maybe, or turns over. "So you gotta hold on."

A smile, faint and completely spontaneous, pulls at the corner of his mouth. Couldn't be anything but real to its foundations; there's no one here to pretend for. "Thought you said you have to let go."

"Have to do both. Was reading this earlier, thinkin' about it." She takes a slow breath - what he now recognizes as her preparing to switch gears from speaking her own words to ones written by someone else, and this time the rustle is unmistakably the pages of a book turning beneath her fingers.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

He hasn't heard it before. For some reason she's never given him this one. It cuts into him, peels something back and exposes something else to the air, leaves it raw. He takes his own breath and holds it, wonders if she can hear. Wonders if she knows.

Of course she knows. By now she couldn't not know. She's tuned to him, tuned in like a radio, and her particular reception is excellent.

And it's not as though it's even something he would want to hide.

He could joke about this. Say something about her killing a mood. But he won't. And she knows that too.

She wouldn't have said anything otherwise.

"I don't think I'm so good at that," he murmurs. He lifts the wolf and stares into its translucent blue eyes. He's better than he was, he's pretty sure, but better just means better. It doesn't mean he's suddenly an expert. He has long years of training to shed.

"Me neither. But I'm tryin'." She lets the silence unfurl again, then says, "Don't worry about the trestle. It's not a big deal. I couldn't have used it as much anyway. Not if we're, y'know. Bein' more careful."

"Yeah." She's right, of course. He knew that. Accepted it. Would have said it himself if she hadn't gotten there first, or at least something like it. But that ache is still there, even if - in practical terms - it doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

"I did think it would always be there," she adds, so low that she's barely audible. Half submerged under the ambient hiss-hum of the open line through which their voices are traveling. "It always has been, since before I was born. But... I haven't even been here all that long. Not really."

"No one has," he says, just as low and soft as her. As if he's there with her and they're whispering to each other under the covers, like children who were supposed to be asleep a while ago. And he's not sure what he means, not sure what pulled the words together and arranged them in that order and delivered them from his lips, but they feel right, and he senses that, like always, she'll understand everything she needs to.

"No. No one has."

Unspoken: Some things have. Many things. Those things get to stay, at least for a very long time, and those things lose us, and maybe they miss us.

But probably they don't. And that's all right. If the world collapsed every time someone left it, nothing would ever hold together at all.

They appear to have discovered a whole new game.

By the end of Tuesday he's sure it's a game, sure they both know it and are silently negotiating the rules, and by late Wednesday afternoon he's started vaguely thinking of it as You're Nice I Guess But I'm Not Paying Any Attention To You. Before, when desperation was driving them into greater and greater degrees of recklessness, every moment in each other's company had been all about stealing and waiting for opportunities to steal. Glances, looks, fleeting and of course purely accidental little touches. Further removed but still not removed enough: Kissing. Groping at each other, hands everywhere. Fucking, fast and hard and over much too soon. Over half their time together had become one enormous spatio-temporal B&E job, and he was never very good at breaking or entering. It's a fucking miracle no one noticed anything. Or so it seems, looking back.

Now it's the reverse. Opportunities where there might be looks? No looks. Looking away. Sometimes doing so a bit pointedly. Chances for touching? No touching. None. Hands kept very firmly inside their respective vehicles. Everything still perfectly cordial, perfectly friendly, because things have to appear as they always have been. Very normal. No weirdness. But she's the Good Girl Farmer's Daughter and he's the Rough Drifter Farmhand, and when all's said and done they absolutely cannot have anything to do with one another.

If they're going to be a cliche, they may as well fucking enjoy it.

Thursday - once again bright and breezy - she walks up the drive with her backpack and her tight jeans, jacket that somehow manages to accentuate the lines of her body rather than obscure them, hair loose today and flowing down over her shoulders and nestling against the sides of her throat in a way that somehow manages to absolutely dismantle him. He passes her on the way to the barn and gives her a single polite nod, which she returns.

Miss Greene.

Mr. Dixon.

If he had a fucking hat he might have lifted it.

In the barn, alone, he takes a second to himself and drops back against the wall and shakes with silent laughter. It's so funny, and it's really fun, and he's perfectly capable of carrying on with the rest of his day but Jesus fucking Christ, he wants to drag her in here and bend her over a hay bale and pound into her until she's screaming for joy.

Well. He can call her later tonight, tell her all about it.

By Thursday afternoon the cleanup is done and the majority of the repairs have been completed - or at least all the ones that had to be done to ensure that everything else can proceed. Daryl lets the cows out to pasture and spends the morning in the field behind the house, clearing away the last of the branches and the few smaller trees that tore free from waterlogged earth and fell. As he works he thinks about the weekend and how he might spend it. Beth can't get away - or neither of them thinks it's a good idea for her to try - so he'll have to come up with some other way of using the time, and staying inside isn't very attractive. The brightness and clarity are set to continue. He wants to be in the world.

He could just drive. Do what he wanted to do with Beth the day they spent on the road and explore. There's a lot around here that he still doesn't know about, a lot of corners into which he hasn't looked, and suddenly he wants to. Suddenly it feels worth doing. Feels like there might be something to discover.

And there's the matter of the shelf. The shelf, and what might make a home there. He doesn't know how to even begin thinking about that part, but maybe he doesn't have to. Maybe Carol was correct and it'll just happen if he steps back and allows it to do so. Let go can apply in a variety of ways to a broad selection of things in a multiplicity of situations.

He never had much control and that's nothing to fear.

He'll find a shelf. And he'll wait for the rest to take care of itself.

Thursday evening, heading home, he scans the streets of town as he drives down them, and something slaps him in the face - not with any ill-intent or desire to hurt him but simply to get his goddamn attention.

Hey. You. Fucking look at this.

So he's looking. Hand on the wheel, watching what's behind and on either side and in front and all around him, radio on and soft and crackling in a way he long ago started to find comforting, and he takes it all in - this weird fucking town in which he never expected to stay long, this weird fucking town which is home to a weird fucking girl who grabbed him and held on and finally, most unexpectedly of all, made him choose.

Made it so he could choose. Still can. Choose more than one thing, so many things, a crazy-quilt of possibilities, every second another choice. He looks around at it all - wide Main Street with light traffic and most of its shops closed up and dark but light still coming from the cafe, the coffee shop, the bar, a few pedestrians wandering home or away from home or nowhere in particular, in pairs and small clots and alone, and the general restfulness of it all. Past the feed-and-seed, dark as well, and he looks up at that fucking building, that fucking ancient chipped brick and that fucking alarmingly rickety stairway up the side, that fucking dirty window he always used to consider kind of his, and Barenaked Ladies crashes in on the radio and he feels a total absence of resentment.

broke into the old apartment
forty-two steps from the street
crooked landing, crooked landlord
narrow laneway filled with crooks
this is where we used to live

What the fuck good would resentment do him now? It's all been done.

On, away from Main and off down side streets long before he reaches the place where the street got washed away - mostly repaired now though it won't ever be the same - past a thrift store and a tiny bakery and into quiet residential lanes lined with heavy trees considerably less heavy since the storm. Past little houses with their lights on against a chilling night, cozy, swinging out into the wealthier neighborhood closer to the high school, the high school itself with its football field and its parking lot in which he's allowed himself to be a total fucking creep, its windows through any of which she might be found on any given weekday. Past that and toward his own neighborhood, the houses aging and falling into poorer repair but still lit, still cozy, still nice.

This isn't him. Not even remotely. He will never belong here, not really. Except he might, part of him. Part of him that he thought was killed a long time ago, that he never even missed. He can be happy here. He really believes that. He is happy here. He has everything he can imagine ever wanting, and so much more that he ever thought he would get. He believes he can be happy here and he's unbelievably blessed, not by a God who was never there for him, never there at all, but by a girl who loves him.

I don't like bein' here.

You lose things.

You lose things and you don't ever want them back.

On Friday night he leaves late and he doesn't go home. He drives, and for once he really has no destination in mind, conscious or otherwise. He heads back in the direction of town but he continues past it, cutting down side roads and circling and looking for places where the land clears and stretches out on either side of him, free of tree cover. The air is clear as polished glass and the moon is rising, a little fuller and a little brighter every night, but not so bright that it outshines all the stars. He can see those too, those scatters of broken diamonds.

Orion. Red Betelgeuse like the beacon top of the radio tower.

He barely glances at road signs - such as they are - and makes turns at random, obeying no real navigational instinct but instead a tug exerted on something running right up the center of his spine. Like a fainter star, it vanishes every time he looks directly at it. He can only perceive it when he makes it peripheral and focuses on something else.

He makes his focus the lines in the center of the road, until the lines disappear and it's just the road, a dark ribbon running across a vast blanket of deeper darkness. All around him, the same darkness that gathered in his room and made him feel so safe, only now it's huge and wild and it's pulling at him.

There are no other cars visible anywhere, no other houses. He has no idea anymore how far out he is, how late it's gotten, how long it might take him to get back. It's been a long week and he should be exhausted, and Hershel still needs him for the front end of tomorrow, but neither of those things seems to matter - neither of those things seems real. This is real, and this is the road.

This is the road out.

The realization is there and he collides with it head-on and it smashes the breath out of him; suddenly he jerks the car over and stomps on the brake, fumbles the door open with fingers that feel too big for his hands, stumbles out onto the blacktop. It's very cold and his breath steams out of him, but he's burning from the inside out, breathing fast and hard like he's been running, been fucking, been doing anything that reminds his body that it's alive. His muscles are locked into a furious cycle of tense-release, and he can feel the chemistry of fight-or-flight boiling through his veins, except all the fight is gone and only the flight remains. He stops in the center of the road and gazes ahead at the way he was going, a long straight road extending to and over the horizon, behind him the moon and ahead of him an ocean of shimmering dark.

He made a night sky for them, for her, and set her into it like a rising moon herself. But he also made it for him. And here it is. Beneath it and beyond it is a world he had no idea was there, spread out and open and ready for him.

His wing itches.

Go.

It's insane, exploding up into him in a dizzying rush like a broken pocket of madness sealed in his mantle. He has no idea where it's all coming from. And he doesn't want to go. His home is back there, his home in every way he could ever use the word and never thought he would, and she's back there, and he doesn't want to go. He wants to never go. Ever.

But he could.

Take her. Take her and go. Everything back there, everything in the way, everything telling you no - fuck it, burn it down, get her and take her and go.

He's shaking. He bites down hard on his lip, fists clenching and unclenching, and tilts his head back and stares up at that endlessly cold, endlessly beautiful sky. Something he could fall into if gravity chose this moment to release him.

Say she did run off with you. Say she married your redneck ass. Got a tumble-down shack in the middle of fuckin' nowhere. Pumped out a couple kids. Say she did that.

But that's not us. That won't be us. Can't be. We're wild and precious, and together we're blessed.

Precious enough for this? Wild enough to make something like that work?

It was a hectic fantasy, far less formed and possessing far less clarity than even his earliest fantasies of her, and really it was only there for a second, but like the briefest and most powerful of dreams it's lingering now, and he can't stop thinking about it. Just about everything that's happened to him in the last three months has been stuff he would have sworn up and down could never in a million years of half-life be possible, and yet it's all been very stubbornly persistent about happening anyway. He doesn't think impossible is a category into which he should be so quick to toss things, nor does he think he should be so set on confining them to it.

So would she? If it came to that, somehow in some scenario whose outlines he doesn't want to fill in? If he went to her and held out his hand and asked her to go with him, run away with him, would she do it? Would she let go? Leave her friends, leave her life here, leave high school in the middle of her fucking senior year - drop out, let's call this what it is - and run?

Leave her family? If he asked? He never would, never, but if he did? Would she say yes?

Would the answer ruin her?

He thinks he's been driving in circles for hours and he has no idea what time it is, and really if nothing else this is pretty goddamn inconsiderate, but he needs to, he needs this, on some level he still does need her, and he gropes for his phone and hauls it out of his pocket like a brick, finds her in his contacts and punches her number.

He catches the time as he does it; it's about twenty minutes after midnight. She might be asleep, sure, but she would want him to do this. He's positive. If she knew how he's feeling right now, she would want him to call.

Four rings. Then her voice, rough and slightly slurred - yes, she was asleep, and a tiny finger-wagging part of himself does feel bad, but the vast majority collapses into profound relief.

"Daryl?"

"Hi." He turns in place. His body is jittery and it wants to do things. He's not completely certain of what. Sprint off into the darkness, possibly, which as ideas go wouldn't be a terribly productive one. "Sorry. You were sleepin'. I'm sorry."

"'s alright." Yawn, expansive and full-voiced. He imagines her tousled hair. He now knows what she looks like after hours of sleep. "What's goin' on?"

I think I'm on some kind of ledge and I don't know how I got here and I need you to talk me down. "Nothin'. I was just... I went out. Drivin'. Wanted to talk to you."

"What about?" She doesn't sound concerned, not exactly, but the lingering sleepy relaxation is slipping out of her voice.

"Nothin' special." I have no fucking idea, I'm sorry, I'm lost. "I just."

He walks a few aimless feet and looks up again, raking his free hand into his hair and gripping, sparkling sting trickling all down his scalp to his hairline and beyond. "You ever wanna run away from home?"

"I... Sure, I guess... Every kid does, one time or another."

"Why? What were you lookin' to run from?"

"I dunno." Another yawn, slower and deeper. If he was there, folding his arms around her and combing his fingers through her hair, fitting himself against her back and drifting in her sweet-smelling warmth. Because he would fit. He would fit to perfection. Because they do. "I guess... Fight with Daddy and Mama? Somethin' else I got mad about? Normal stuff." She pauses and he can feel her working through this, feeling out its form. "Why are you askin'?"

"Just wonderin'."

"You did." Not a question. She would never need to ask. "All the time."

"Thought about it. Never thought it would happen." He wanted to escape, wanted it with everything in him capable of wanting, but it was purely conceptual, pure theory, even after he saw Merle do exactly that - watched him run into the loving embrace of service to his country and all the bullshit that came after. That was Merle. That was never him. He was never going to be strong enough. And if he got caught...

And no one was coming to help him.

"Why not?"

All those reasons, sure. But there was something else - maybe the biggest one. Sitting there, blocking all the roads, squatting like a malevolent toad and blinking slowly at him with its dead eyes. It was always the last thing that stopped him when he came close to working up the courage to try. He would approach it, stare at it for a long time, and finally turn away and go back where he belonged.

"Wasn't nothin' to run to."

"There is now," she says softly, and although of course she can't see him, he nods.

"There is now."

Great big world out there. Always was.

Except was it? Was it really? Was it there before he came here, before he found her? Was it there, my girl, or did you dream it into being? Did we, both of us, together?

The moment he saw her by the side of the road in the rain, was that the moment? The creation of the tangent universe into which he slipped without realizing it, so much brighter and more beautiful and more alive than the one in which he lived for nearly four decades until he was so beaten down that he no longer regarded his own life as something worth saving? Until he fell into this world, and started learning how to live in it?

Was that when it happened?

Or has it not happened yet?

"Where are you?" She knows. Somehow - uncomfortably perceptive girl, thoughtful, wise - she knows what this is, she knows why he called her, and she knows what he's looking at right now. She may not know the details, may not be able to pinpoint his location, but she knows him and she knows.

So don't fucking lie to her.

"I'm on the road." Because he is. It's the truest thing he could say. The road.

"I can't hear you that well. You're kinda fadin' in and out."

"I'm sorta... in the middle of nowhere." In the liminal. I'm between. "The stars are real bright."

"Are you comin' home?"

Could mean so many things. Means only one.

"Yeah." No thought necessary. He doesn't need time to decide. "Gonna come back now."

"Alright."

He turns and looks back the way he came. Really, it looks exactly the same in this direction. If he wasn't careful he could mistake one for the other.

Except no. In the distance, so faint he almost can't see it at all, is the winking red star of the radio tower.

Surely he came too far out for it to be visible. Yet there it glows. And it's the same one. It might not be - but it is.

"I'm comin' back," he repeats softly.

"I love you." Sleepy again, her voice a deep hum. He can see her snuggling into her sheets, her blankets, phone tucked against her ear. "Be careful."

"Love you too."

Line closed. He lowers his phone and watches the red star twinkle.

He kept no track of his turns as he made them and he has no clear idea of where he is, but he's not lost and he doesn't need satellites to guide him back. He has celestial navigation at his disposal, the fallback of travelers on trackless roads for thousands upon thousands of years.

Except he knows something else.

Polaris marks true north. But Polaris didn't always. A thousand years ago another star filled that role, and in a thousand years more of equinoxical precession yet another will have taken its place.

Nothing lasts. Not even very old things. Not even stars, not even these winter constellations turning above him. Everything is mortal and everything changes. He did. She did. They will.

This is a very old story, and every story ends.

He gets in the truck, turns around, and goes back where he belongs.

Note: poem is "In Blackwater Woods" by Mary Oliver. Song is "The Old Apartment" by Barenaked Ladies.