The coarse sand hugs your feet as you walk, slowly, even as it cools in the dusk. The dirt road is empty, silent, and you walk to make no noise. Trees seem, in passing, an extension of the earth, molded from the same mud, pulled and stretched into gaunt vaulting curves that reach towards the darkening, still starless, sky. The sun sinks bright gold to deep rose to murky grey and the trunks of every tree burn pink and their spider limbs, just now dusted with buds, reach black against the last light of the sky. They open as you pass through like mouths, ringed with branches and wreaths as teeth. There is no smell yet of baked sand or salt from the shore. Instead, the air is filled with green, with mulch. In the absolute quiet you are slipping smoothly, sleeping soundly, sinking madly into this singular moment - and you are the only one. Soon it will be warm, the air will taste like summer and the dark come later. Soon new growth will harden and brown, dropping leaves to the pine covered ground. Soon freezing rain and snow will pelt life to a desolate gray. Soon sap will run again, nights will be untroubled, and you will walk here, in this same spot, at this same time, hoping to recapture this one instant - this one instant when you are the only human being in existence, watching as time slows down.
