He feels like an anchor stuck fast in this new world.
The rest of them are pulled here and there as the mists part and fresh meccas are revealed. The rest of them scurry, frantic with their worry or fear or desire for power. He watches them from the meadow, one of the last vestiges of the old Beqanna. It never occurs to him to move his feet in earnest like the rest. He doesn’t dash for the salt air that tangles in the manes of one group of survivors and turns their faces northward. He doesn’t head towards the west when the heavy scent of pine lures in another band (he ignores the ravens that stir in his mind). He has no desire to see the world torn asunder and haphazardly rearranged. Here, it is easy to imagine that all is well, that nothing has changed. He stays in his meadow, lets the wild grasses grow higher with each passing day against his hocks as they always have.
He tries not to think of her.
It becomes yet another failure to add to his life’s total. Because Walter sees her in the golden haze of spring fading into summer. In the faces of the sunflowers that bob along the edge of the meadow, almost playful as he passes them, he thinks of the mischievous gleam she kept in her eyes. He hears her bangles in the shrill call of a waxwing.
His memories and feet are anchors.
The palomino drags himself through each day that seems destined only to repeat itself. Nothing changes, save for the entire world outside of his little realm. Nothing inspires him to change course, either. He spends entire days walking through his memories, replaying conversations and tracing the lines of faces. He tries to pinpoint the exact moments where he went wrong (what he left unsaid, what touch or gesture he missed because he simply couldn’t reach out). He counts all of the times he slipped back behind the pine trees as Djinni slept, too afraid to push through, until he runs out of numbers.
The night becomes his next companion. The stars wink at him like the sunflowers. It’s easier to hold their gaze, too. Easier to slip in the shadows of an untouched oak and turn his face towards the speckled black above. Easier to watch the sky spin around the earth while the constellations danced instead of thinking about her. Walter becomes almost drunk on the spin. Dizzy and disoriented, he levels his gaze on someone’s approach. She shines, and he wonders if the stars are falling – wonders if they’ve heard the silent wish he’s made nearly every night.
“You,” he exhales, somewhere between a question and confirmation. His head is fuzzy with exhaustion and the tilting, spinning sky, but he knows she must be. Like his meadow, like the rising and falling of nations and changing of the seasons, constants do not disappear.
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long