It’s true what they say. About her. About the memories left behind.
To know her was to rest your soul in a chair by the window—spending afternoons awake, but eyelids heavy in the September evenings.
And to leave her—well, that was something else. Something cold, sharp. To leave her was to forget your own name. To leave her was to sink.
It was too familiar a feeling. Inescapable, really.
And again, on my walk, she came and went, with a few final inches of light, nesting herself between the cold stone of that mill—our mill—and warming weeds before she was gone. If she’s wanting, she might spend a moment to fill the spaces between—the dark spaces, the ones we’ll yet become.
I used to take her down to that old mill on Sundays for something to do.
I wasn’t the most romantic or spontaneous and I always fell asleep at the movies. But my Dad used to take me down there, even after I was grown, and we’d sit at the benches and watch the kids laugh and look time in the face.
We had too much of it, sometimes. But we were never bored.
The day was like that now, too. The way it was at our mill. When I looked for the edge of the dawn, I was met instead with a great, golden stretch. The sun was alive today—it had a warmth made to drown in and live in, and when it touched me, when it whispered its hot breath at my neck, I felt myself melt in its wake.
That was the real joy of being human.
Owning my sliver of the sun.