He was old and she was young, or so it seemed.
He looked at her and knew she didn’t know what he did,
Couldn’t possibly.
She was so nervous, so white, and her eyes burned with the purity of a bruised innocence.
She was the angels that sat in heaven, with their souls so white because they could not remember
All the sin that was in the world – because they had never thought it in their heads.

She was still, and didn’t move, and couldn’t look at him.
She was blank, and timid, and shy, and surely she was good.
And he was old and she was young.

The world seemed to stop when he looked at her skin – like milk and honey mixed to one,
It glowed even in the fluorescent lamplight, and held the light and it was so new.
His was not new. His knew the world’s harsh and teasing glare – the sunlight and the stares of eyes that judged. And how he had wanted it to be a better place, and he had not been able to make it so.

But she knew nothing of this – she was only young, so young – so full of nothing of the young.
Dreams that were not formed, nascent and unformed like mistrals wrapping in warm and tropical breath around the stems of not-yet-formed flowers.
The richness of the growing of it all overcoming all the cold and harsh and unnatural knowing of age. That was what he saw in her. The foggy waves of the human form, overcome by its own inner, strong, almost indecent energy. How it warmed him.

She sat across from him at the dinner table and gazed at him as he spoke. For a moment she seemed lost in his every movement – nervous as they were under her beauty, and beside the loveliness of all her hair and skin and lips. She took no notice, but laughed with him, yet she was far away. So far away. She regarded him from behind a veil of tears – behind something he could not understand. It was her age.

He spoke to her of all sorts of things – of this and that and the other. She was like talking to the ears of a cloud. How could you know if the cloud liked what you said? But it would not tell you that it did not. It would drift about you and keep you warm in all its mist and wonder and its foggy uncertainty.

And she watched him. Once or twice she offered comment, as if to see how he would react to it. And she gazed at his reaction as if he was a memory.

But she was his memory. His memory of a youth he never knew – of a passion he had been afraid to know. She reminded him and yet she becalmed him. She made him anxious and terribly afraid.

That night her sadness seemed to penetrate the air around her. How she held his face in the palms of her hands. Just once – just once so warmly in the cups of her palms, as if cupping the water of the grail, as if he were the child of her own womb. As if he was the sunlight that would be extinguished forever just in the length of the next second. She looked at his eyes and she wandered in his gaze, in her dark eyes the waters of the sea looked back at him – not the empty waters, but the depths of all the seas of the world and she looked at him with those angel’s eyes, with those sea eyes, with her warmest of hands cupping the planes of his face and she said nothing.

He looked back at her startled.

It was a few days later she looked at him across the back of the chair and told him he must. He must go forward. He must do what was right. He must. She told him not in words but in the small movement of her mouth – the tears she held in her eyes and would not let fall. She knew his struggle but she would not let him lose it. But she was young.

She watched him as he left that morning. He would not win. But he would not fail. She kept him company in his thoughts all day – her shining skin woke him from his reverie when he failed to keep up on the issues at hand. That milky-lightning skin, the pain of the memory awoke him. And he spoke. He spoke because she was young and he was old, and it was her world as well as his. It was their world. He spoke out.

He returned that evening, and the room was dark.

The room was dark, but on the bed lay a beautiful white thing. It shone in the murky shadows, it spread across the counterpane like spilled moonlight.

He went to it. She lay there, like a sylphan thing, like something from the tales of the woods, like a silvery scar across the barren landscape of the counterpane. She gazed at him from her dark sea eyes. She looked at him, but she did not move.

She blinked. “Remember” she said. “you remember.” She stated it, and she turned her head, and she went to sleep. And he remembered.

He remembered her skin, when he was young. He remembered her falling from the bridge. He remembered the way her hair had flowed in the water as she floated down the deep river, and how it had been pulled back as she had been lowered into the ground. When he was young and she was young. He had been young. He was so young – and she so old. She had told him, somehow, she had known all along the knowledge of age, and yet she had held his face in the cups of her palms. The moonlight-scar faded from the bed. Only a streak, as if of butterfly-dust lay where she had lain. Only the tears in his eyes held her.