The couple clung onto their narrow edge of road, driving recklessly on a two-lane highway off the western cliffs, the kind of winding path that looks serene in daylight but monstrous at night. He was blasting music that offended the sights around, so she switched it off and with all her girlish command, ordered her companion to listen to the rush of darkness, to the absence of stillness, to the energetic, scouring, thundering below -- couldn't he feel it? It clears all the senses, fills all the senses. He shrugged as his irritation crumpled from his shoulders and rolled off somewhere underneath his seat. He hadn't "felt it" - he was enjoying the last of the summer balm with his favorite song and favorite girl when she was less like this, but there was no changing her mind. He sighed. Something had taken a hold and she was no longer his, no longer there - but belonged to something in the wind.
They stopped the car on the edge of the highway on the outermost rim of earth, and leaned over against the emptiness until they were laying down on the loose eroded mountainside, facing the sea below, a body full of silver. She watched it reach upward, eagerly, greedily, as the sky obliged and sent an electric jolt through the reaching tips and lit a million shining currents that skid fleetingly across the shore. The current coursed through her spine. She stood up and breathed over the ledge as he put his arms around her, and she leaned into them. She stood inside, looking outward for that glimpse of eternity as if they were standing on this cliff as their hairs greyed and their eyes crinkled.
She was all he needed, all he wanted, standing in front of him leaning over death and life. He would do anything, anything for her. When she laid, he would lay; where she stood, he would stand. Shouldn't that be enough, shouldn't this be it? But somewhere in the hidden squares of his devotion, he knew that it wasn't. Beauty was beauty, and that's all they needed to know - isn't that what she had said once? Some famous poet said it, or something like it. It wasn't fair, but that didn't matter much. He would be enough, even if he didn't understand what she wanted, even though she always spoke in riddles made for art, where the right answer was never right enough. It wasn't fair.
His eyes had never left her and she could feel them smile almost at the same moment she grimaced. His resolve was disturbing, a desperation wrought from the end. She tore herself from the silvery expanse and faced him with a look, as though she was only showing him the back of her soul.
"You know, this is a scientific phenomenon."
"What?"
"You should look-- really look at it. Have you?"
"I did-- I am. It's really pretty."
"Yeah, it's pretty," she laughed unkindly.
"What do you want me to say?"
"Nothing. Never mind."
"I don't like these questions."
"I said, never mind, as in, let's drop it."
"Okay, well, it is pretty."
She nodded as she turned her face away from the cliff again and they stood there, in another kind of silence until it grew too cold to stand. They slipped back into the car, and he smiled tiredly as their song came on again. He twisted the dial and they were heading back towards reality, free for five minutes in the space between, though she always brought with her a quiet trace of magic from the sea.
