The chill wind made the whole world crisp and new as it carried away the mists of the earlier rains and the clouds that had brought them. The cold might have taken his breath away, if it had not already been taken by starlit beauty before him. He straightened his back, feeling the creaking of his vertebrae as his pulled his overcoat closer to himself, doing his best to keep his face from cracking into a wide smile.
It was one of those rare evenings where the world was made of darkened jade and lined with beaten silver. From the hilltop, the forest went on forever, a rich sea whose vitality hid slumbering in the shadows cast by the crystal light of the moon overhead. The crags and rocks lining the hill were their marble steps, the palisade of their secret faerie palace, which needed no floors nor walls, for none dared attack it nor desecrate its beauty. It had a ceiling however, as this night Atlas held up a velvet dome, and smiled down on them with his cloak of diamonds.
And for all the beauty, none of that was what had taken his breath away. It was the girl before him, with droplets of starlight caught in the black ringlets of her hair. He smiled to himself at that. He was wrong in calling her that, since she was as much a girl as he was a boy, but young men and women always tried to escape those titles and the mixing loss and gain of youth and responsibility that came with them. She turned toward him, gaily throwing a glance over her shoulder, and for a moment all thought ceased.
His lips pursed slightly, his eyebrows lowered, and the lids dipped slightly as all his focus was drawn on a single point. All his might was placed in the herculean effort of recording every detail, every shade. In the moonlight she looked almost elven, as it made her porcelain face glow, framed perfectly by and the black flow of curls, flecked with silver where they caught the light. The open and honest smile, which was half-parted in laughter and vaguely misted with breath. The glint of her brown doe’s eyes, the kind that put mythical Helen’s to shame, as they started a war in his heart every time he saw them. He didn’t know it, but he had cracked into a smile himself.
Then his thoughts began again, something drawing time back into the regular pace with its rhythms and melodies. A moment later he recognized the sound as her voice, and his name. or one of them, at any rate.
“Cyrano,” she had called. He could never quite describe that tone of voice.
His face had relaxed again, and he sighed to himself almost despairingly. He had failed and he knew it. For all his skill as a painter, her likeness was infinitely beyond his abilities, the perfect reality only marred in some indefinable way when placed on a canvas. It always lacked her incomparable vitality. He had spent innumerable hours memorizing every facet of her eyes, and while he felt it was no personal loss as no time spent in that way could ever be wasted, his words had never been able to do them justice. It was his personal failing as a writer, as well.
“Yes, my dear Roxane?” she pulled her scarf closer around her neck and played with her gloves.
“It’s beautiful out tonight,” with that she turned and danced away and started making her way down the marble colored stone, the dreamlike quality of the landscape almost making her forget the realities of early morning dew on stone. He resisted the urge to respond with the painfully clichéd and so are you and opted simply to urge her to be careful. A moment later, he followed her with the slow steady strides, exacting as much of the pure vita of life as he could from every moment and each breath.
It was nice, he concluded, being out in the early morning for the sole reason that it was beautiful and that she was pleasant. Already, she had made her way down to the lake, standing as a solitary silhouette against the black mirror of the waters. She would have been lost completely against the backdrop with her dark coat and black hair if it were not for the shining white oval of her face. Even in the distance, he could still tell she was beaming. By the cold air on the inside of his cheeks, he judged that he must have still been smiling as well.
Before long, he was by her side again, staring out into the great placidity that was this lake without a name. He began to muse. That it had no name seemed to give it all the more significance, not that it was so unimportant that it had gone unnamed, but that it was so ancient that all names had been lost, that civilizations had named it and gone, and that hundreds or thousands of young couples over the millennia of the earth have come here to this spot at these times to marvel at its ancient beauty, He should his head. Again, his use of the wrong words. While they were a pair, they were not a couple, in all the connotations that held.
He turned to her, feeling for a moment a profound sense of longing that he could not articulate. She, in turn, looked down at the waters. After a moment, she pointed at their reflections, and his gaze was drawn to the pair staring back at them from the black mirror. He locked gazes with his reflection, gazing into his own soul. He saw his edged jaw, with its arrogant cast, barely controlled hair, and piercing eyes. He wondered at the other world in the lake. Were they a couple there, in that undisturbed blackness that ran its own parallel to the lives of those that came before it? He shrugged before realizing that he was now the subject of her unrelenting gaze.
He turned to her. The smile was gone, replaced by look of absolute earnestness and intentness. He leaned forward, a feeling of closeness coming over him as he returned her stare. Was it worth it, he thought? This was where he always found himself. Was it worth it, endangering a friendship for a potentially misguided attempt at a relationship? He paled a bit at the thought as he considered the risk versus the gain. He only had to say a few words.
Suddenly, he smiled and turned away, the moment gone. Even as he began to walk away from the lake and she fell into step with him, he was unsure as to whether or not he made the right decision. There was a weight in his stomach, and he felt that the chill must have cut deep that evening, since his heart felt as cold as the night air around him.
