They drove in the rain, in the quiet, through slickened dark green forests, the sky tired steely grey above them. He held the wheel loosely, happy but not satisfied, awake but tired, free but worried. The shadows danced under his eyes, their depths at once near and far. The ring on his finger glimmered dully in the silver half-light.
Next to him, she looked vacantly and intently out the window, eyes flashing over tall, brooding trees, streaming with the rain, and dark, sable-colored ground littered with snake-colored foliage. Her blue eyes were faded and tired, worn from use and heavy with thought. She was young, but her weight was old, beyond her years. Her edges were blurred, like she could slip out of sight at any moment.
The car climbed steadily up the worn asphalt road with its golden stripe now faded and cracked, rutted slightly with use. It plashed through puddles and hushed under the tunnel of spiderwebbing tree branches, up in those distant, ancient mountains. Everything was sacred there because so little is sacred elsewhere, and the quiet seemed the only natural thing. It was a place to hide in and a place to mourn; an escape both welcoming and forbidding. It humbled and ignored, its life going on regardless of human comings and goings. Fragile and timeless; a place that did not look back or stop for anything, even disaster.
They hummed through it, the wilderness ill-defeated by a skinny road, the patter of the rain their only punctuation.
He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away to stare out the rain-dashed window instead, her sea-blue eyes a million miles away.
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