“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”
Last time he saw the swamp, the cliffs, the vineyard, the sparkling city, it had been snowing. Michael had gone to the coast for the winter, as he is often pulled to do, pulled along by the chains of nostalgia that invariably sends him right back to the sea again and again. Michael suspects he is not alone in this. There is not a world he imagines where old men don't stare out at the waves capped in foam and the blue-gray of the ocean and feel bitter, almost acidic longing.
And, more than that, last time he attended a festival it was exactly a year ago, in the streets and then the woods of his own city. He vaguely remembers it as the first time he looked at Isra and felt fear creeping in at the edges like radio static.
The far more salient memory is following a sad girl into a corn maze with a stranger-- he remembers the twist in his heart (jealousy?) and a bottomless need to see her smile, to see her live, and laugh, and---
To see her; that's all Michael wants. That's all he ever wants, he thinks.
And he does-- see her, I mean. Looks up from the thin road that snakes its way from the city toward the orchard to find her: bright as the changing leaves, and sometimes as brittle as one, too.
"Another festival," he says, conversationally, though he's already picking up baskets for each of them and holding the larger one out for her to take. "Please come pick apples with me. I'll tell you a secret if you do."
Michael smiles, like all warm autumn things: leaves that crunch underfoot, apple cider, yellow straw, will blankets and a fire crackling in the hearth.
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