and I ran back to that hollow again
the moon was just a sliver back then
She is lost for a moment in his story, eyes closing as she imagined the meadow that he talks of, and the father who seems to bring both nostalgia and unbearable sadness to his voice. She leans against him and concentrates on the shape of his words, not thinking of a response but letting herself follow the path that he laid out for her, the sides of her barrel expanding and falling in rhythmic motion as she lost herself.
There are things about his meadow that remind her of her own wanderings, although they had not been home but the place she had run to from it. They had become both refuge and prison for her, the silence both calming and maddening. She had spent time there because she had been chased from her own home by something darker than she understood, the illness leaving her body only after weeks of her absence.
Still, there is something in her that wants nothing more than to see his own meadow.
So she is sad when he is done speaking and does not bother to hide the sorrow in her own eyes at his question; it seemed foolish when they were stripped so raw in front of one another. Why bother shielding something from him when she was already so naked in front of his troubled gaze? “It was hot—unbearably so sometimes. Mother didn’t seem to mind, but father wasn’t built for it the way she was. So eventually she pulled water from the ground to create an oasis for him, a haven from the sun.”
Her mind wanders back to the desert and her bones ache with the longing. She had thought she would spend the rest of her days among the dunes like her family; she had never imagined that the possibility of it would be stripped from her. “It was easy to get lost in the sand—it was all you could see for miles. Just white-hot sand and blue skies and a sun so large it felt impossible. It was beautiful in the way that dangerous things always are and not for the faint of heart.” A sigh. “And, ultimately, not for me.”
and I ached for my heart like some tin man
when it came, oh, it beat and it boiled and it rang