When I close my eyes, she opens hers. I can see her, looking into the mirror of the gulf that divides us. I remember the way her lips form the letters of the words she’s trying to tell me, but I can’t remember the sounds. Each second of a syllable is a snapshot frozen in time, the zoetrope rotates around and around repeating the same pattern but their words are lost to the cosmic roar, forever diffusing throughout the continuum.

I see her upon a hill, I stand with her, in her spot displaced by generations. She stands, hand outstretched toward the sunset battered clouds, baring their bruises of purple and pink as the light disappears beyond the witch-wild horizon. Through her fingers – golden streams of light trickle like a stream expelling its lifeblood down the ancient channels that shaped it, carried it, nurtured it from birth. Emerald sheafs of native grasses bow in playful repose to the gently shifting zephyrs.

A seed planted at her feet in days of youth, she rests her hand upon the sapling as I sit in the low slung branches and contemplate the lives we’ve lived, the roads we’ve traveled to end up overlooking the same ever changing valley. A seed in her time, a tree in mine as the aether of existence courses along its xylem sentience.

Seasons crash like moth’s wings around her shoulders, icicles shattered upon the frozen ground and dust swept silently upon a flitting filigree. The stillness of a summer sojourn sends twisters tearing through time to my terrible temporary torpor.

She stands atop the hill, the dying rays of sunlight streaming through her fingers as she languidly lounges along the river of inevitability, flowing from one instant to the next in a steady, even course. She turns and smiles at me but I was never there, I’m further along the course naturally, but I am looking at me through her eyes a hundred years past to a present in a hundred years future.I open my eyes and I’m alone, but she has closed hers and looks through mine. This is the world she thought she’d never live to see, this is the life that follows the pattern of the cyclical weaves that repeat each instance again and again but never the same as before. The life lived a hundred years distant follows the same stream, snags in the same eddies, all that’s changed is the date, which has changed everything. She turns to leave the hill and I stay to watch a while longer. The stars arrive to bear mute witness to the ages and generations between us, our lives separated by no more than a glimmer by their reckoning. The wind catches her dress and whisks her down the hill, the silent flurries caress her shoulders and nip at my cheeks as her hand brushes against the young tree whose boughs I’ve climbed to seek my solitude. The sun exits with a deep, formal bow, a grand finale punctuated by the drawing of a cape to reveal night’s majesty. The air is warm and humid, resting in gorged decadence from the day’s bounty. She left with the sweet scent of Spring in her step, I smell the rich, amber aroma of loamy Autumn with mushrooms hidden beneath the deciduation of Summer.

Our course is a river, one tributary to the next our lives wend and roam soaking up colors from the palette of the wilds. The branches snake off innumerable, us in essence but we are not those paths, those lakes and streams belong to the we who followed a different choice, once made and made a million times more. But our path, one path with countless variations, tethered by a tree, by a seed planted in days of youth. I sleep and I dream her life, or perhaps she sleeps and dreams mine.