At first she doesn’t say much as she sits in the boat with him. (Years later, unable to maintain a clear memory of her face, he will carry in his head a bright landscape of sky and trees and the wide, still bay, disturbed only by the presence of a small boat and two blurry figures sitting in it, half obscured by the sunlight). Instead she trails her fingers in the water as he sings village songs in a low, humming voice. When she does begin to talk, she asks him how he learned to tie that funny knot, and what’s the biggest fish he’s caught, and has he ever loved anyone. He tries to answer her in a way that he hopes isn’t too inviting or too dull. He can’t tell if she’s listening or not; oftentimes she’ll be leaning over the boat edge, staring into the green water, her fist under her chin.

See the lush shouldered mountains, circled in a wide, silent meeting? See the scattering of iron masts poking at the blue sky? See the silhouettes of eagles arcing high over the village, where small figures move amongst furrows bursting with green? Where a sharp voice or a bicycle bell or even an insistent bee may fail to stir the dogs sleeping in their hot stone yards?

There are things she never tells him. That she saw him from the window and dreamed that night of chestnut skin. That she followed him through alleys and rice fields and up the dirt path that climbed the neck of the village, scurrying all the way and hiding a distance behind his steady, straight-backed walk. That when they are together she feels a fragile calm. That she sees the flickering uncertainty in his eyes as he considers her questions or when she attempts to answer those questions herself.

We meet for the first time so often that you’re no longer you and I’m no longer much of me. Or maybe it’s still us but slipped into new costumes that suit our new selves. You are more lost, more selfish. More slippery and brave. I am sometimes chasing, sometimes hiding. I give myself the things I never had, certain skills or education or clothes. I can’t help putting a large window behind one of us.