Moonlight

-He had fallen in love once. She had been nearly perfect. That was not why he had fallen in love. She had been absolutely beautiful. That was not why either. He had not realized she was beautiful until he had already fallen in love. They met by chance, or fate, or happenstance. She had been walking. He had been walking. They found that they were both headed in the same direction, with the same destination in mind, at the same time. It was not the first time this had happened, but it was the first time they noticed. He smiled, or tried to smile. It was hard for him to verify if what he attempted was actually successful. He had one of those faces which really has to be forced to lighten up. He tried. He looked over at her and he addressed her. It was easy. He did not feel anything flutter inside him, then. She smiled before responding to his question. She had the kind of face which lightens easily. At least that’s how he remembers, remembered, perceived it. But she did smile. He smiled too, after her response. It was not love, but the lightness of conversational connection. That was the first time they noticed each other. It was not the last. These walks, the destination, the time, were a quotidian activity for both of them. They began to have converse during this part of their day, when this part of their experience was, in fact, part of their day. These conversations began to transform the walks, the quotidian, the activity. The activity, the quotidian, the walks became more frequent, because of the conversations. The conversations became something they both looked forward to. They became the reason for the necessary. They became what they built their days around. These shared moments became the space for their souls to breathe. It was this breath that began the fluttering inside them. Perhaps it was the combination, the breath and the fluttering, the moments became magical. Time for them would not stop but they stood outside of the quotidian nonetheless; their souls breathing, as they watched the sunlight lapse in its path across the sky, and the sky swallow up the light leaving only the glowing embers of the stars. They would often walk haloed by the moonlight; not wanting to end the moment, the conversation, the breathing of the soul. Perhaps it was a matter of fluttering, the soul’s breathing and the alchemy of moonlight. Perhaps it was the argon they exchanged, the rhythm of a soul’s breath and the way two souls approach a synchronicity, or all the words they had exchanged and the way they had manipulated the morphemes of the language to create meanings only they understood. They fell. The both of them. They could tell in each other’s smile. They could tell before the smile. Simple presence, in silence. They could tell. And after they had exhausted sound and shaped it into a myriad landscapes they stretched out the minutes and filled them with that silence which somehow says more than any number of words could, and for which there could never possibly be enough words for ample description. Their time stretched, but words diminished. Their throats dried and became nothing more than hollowed passages for the silence. Their bodies stilled completely, together. They returned to the soil. The light within them was absorbed by the moon. This moonlight continues to spill in the night, over that space where he fell in love once.