I have watched your calves strain to carry your muscle and bone through the lowlands; listened to low hum of your breath ahead of me, surveying the rolling hills below us. We keep getting closer to the sky, and I can’t tell if I’m lightheaded due to the altitude or from being so close to you in such silence for so long.
I don’t know how to say what I want to say.
I don’t know how to say what I want to say, which is that I have waited a lifetime to find someone good enough to bring here, to lay down among the heather. Now we’re here, lost to the world in the Ochils, it feels almost criminal to disturb the peace of the wind whispering through your hair. I know I should be grateful for sunshine but mostly I am grateful for the line of your shoulder blades and the silence between us, which is calm and comfortable and not as fraught and charged as that shared with shadows from my past.
That’s what I thought love was. Racing hearts and sweaty palms and feeling like the ground might crumble if he-who-I-loved didn’t hold it up.