The way up the mountain winds in familiar fashions, sunlight gleaming through hillsides on fire, maple leaves trilling in the breeze. The car ahead of you slows to a crawl; you know they are simply mesmerized. When we pass, an old man sits smiling in the driver's seat. We cannot possibly be angry.
Hike past throngs of people, reach a quiet outcrop in the shade, the Catskill mountains billowing out around us and a great waterfall roaring at our side. We make jokes about the fresh air in our lungs, about how our familiarity with tenement walkups help us get up the steep steps to the mountaintop. Everything is a freedom. Later, we sit reading on quiet couches, red wine in our glasses and apple pie in our bellies, there is no panic the upstate cannot soothe, no noise it cannot silence. He writes convoluted soliloquies of longing, you try them out on your body to see how they may fit, but it's too soon to tell. You take warm baths and fall asleep in a town silent as death.
Silent as a heart cleansed of darkness.
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