If he had loved hella

There were two children in summer who would walk everyday, when the moon was right, across the sandbar to the kissing trees. They walked with hair that disguised them from above as moving dots of blonde sand. What betrayed any presence to the gulls were the small footprints that followed them: winding and random, slipping in and out of pools of water, stopping, circling, and losing shape when the girls ran. They ran fast when they wished, kicking soft sand up behind them that stuck to the backs of their thighs, and went slow where the sand was good for it and full of feeling, warm from the sun and moist from the sea. 

Occasionally, there were two others, after the girls went by, at a steadier pace, right next to each other. The girls, with all the fire the wind blew alive in them, and caught by all the small attention the waves persisted at their ankles, greeted the island far before the second pair who followed. Everything caught the girls’ attention. Those spiraled shells, and fragments of sea, and strange dared feelings of slick seaweed between the toes. The intent walk, bare feet upon barnacles, and secret impassive glances at the other, under a locked jaw. But the second two went slow, they came to the island in good time. 

Hella tried to be good. She walked sometimes along with those girls, her girls, and with her husband, and she knew she was good, as she gritted her teeth and sat down to love. She could only give him what he wanted and he could only do the same, and the firmness of his resentment was the rock where she clung, when the ocean got vicious. All she could be was a woman, all he could be was a man. 

She liked how the girls looked like him, when she looked. She loved him in them. The tenderness she ached to give crashed to them in waves, in rebellion of the locked dam it found of her heart. It escaped through her fingers with a hard tug, when she brushed and braided the long hair like his that they grew without the slightest thought to all that beauty called carelessly into the world.  The love wrestled itself painfully from her heart if she watched the impatience for experience too long while they fussed. She combed them smooth. 

She knew, she did know, she did watch him look away, and she did feel the resigned weight of his hand when she held it. There was this, only this: that they had made the choice, and they turned away this time from the horizon, they let the ships pass. I want this, and I will bear it. Beside him, barefoot, they walked slowly over the barnacles. The girls, ever restless, would go to Spain also, one day, or Paris, and they would pick up shells there to show her. They will study, as she did, but they wouldn’t return quietly to thier place. Look at their wildness. 

So she knew, and he knew, silently in bed, when they touched or did not touch, that there was love, in the silence and space. The bitter kind, built with hands. He did not say it, as they walked on the beach to the kissing trees, as they felt the sand and sun and wind, and watched the children. I will love you.