That time.

(Small disgression from travel talk at the end of a hard week)

She remembers that day they walked into Molinaseca carefully.

It was cool for the first time since....the beginning. It was cool in a way they forgot about in all those days over the fiery Meseta. It was mountainous. Clear.

Sometime before lunch they reached the highest point and there they wrote things on rocks that were meant to be secrets. He looked at hers anyway and then didn´t leave her side the whole day. It was the day her uncle died and she´d known it had happened from the moment she wrote ´Uncle, be peaceful´ on that rock, and she told him so. That she´d felt her Uncle pass.

He never left her side the whole day.

Sometime after lunch she took a photo of him on a rocky pass. The horizon a sea of mountains and green and the sky crisp with those clouds, those ethereal clouds. His t-shirt was blue and not ripped yet. His hair stuck to the right.

Click.

Later, as she picked her way carefully across that rocky rubble she told him about her fractured collarbone. That bone to the right that would jut and swell slightly when it rained, damaged doing dive rolls in an ill-fated karate class. He asked her why she was taking karate and she could tell he already knew the answer. Because she wanted to be a ninja.

She asked about his parents, his sisters and he spoke of them quietly, as an old soul. They talked about life, and also about geology.

Later she called her mother (and got the sad news) while he sat next to her. She cried quietly on his shoulder, and then alone behind that hostel staring at that farm and feeling bad that she didn´t want to go home.

At dusk he bought her beer and threaded her blister. She found a magic paste for his arm, infected with a cut from that drunken night. Then they ate vegetarian soup with huges chunks of bacon that she dropped bit by bit onto his plate while they laughed and stared at each other.

She remembers that day on the grass in Portomarin carefully.

They sat in that damp grass against that concrete, elbow to elbow for hours. The others talked and played songs on that ukelele and rolled cigarettes from loose tobacco to save money. They ate ham flavored chips that she liked because of him and despite being a vegetarian.

They all started dinner separately so they would have more wine. Wine in addition to all that cheap supermarket wine in the afternoon, and beer on the lawn, and all that. After dinner the others smoked cigarettes of tea and they laid back in the damp grass talking about how he caught up with her that other day and how she was glad for it. They talked about differences that didn´t matter, and they also talked about geology.

It got cold, up there in those mountains and she wore his hoodie, and in that sea of people they went to sleep. Happy.

She thinks of those days carefully. In that mass of good days. Threaded to her, into her. She thinks of them especially in the absence of any help for that ache. That burrowing thing that she picked at and scarred and so matches that one on his shoulder.

She thinks of those days specifically, carefully. And walking west in her memory, she leaves them there... in that mass of perfect days.