The sacred dark

Frigid fingers of winter's Herald unfurl as softly and sweetly as a shadow, curling inward through the gaps in an unevenly hung door frame. From beyond the electricity borrowed warmth of confort, tendrils of beckoning midnight tiptoe shyly across the light dappled floor and whisper sweetly in my ear. Knowing a rare invitation, I rise eagerly from the cradle of my shared bed and don strange defenses against a climate I am unfamiliar with. Beside me, my lover similarly armors himself, complete with a yellow pom pom bedecked beanie. As he pulls the crooked barricade from the threshold of frost bitten temptation, we exchange furtive glances and quick smiles. Childish giggles soon follow as the first blast of below freezing air gasps around us. The glacial midnight rouges our noses and catches out breath in midair as we emerge into the element. Even through our layers, icy shadows prick our skin, tapping bold shivers down our spines as we journey forth into the awaiting dark. I follow closely as venture away from the comfortably safe glow of honest light and towards the tenebrous gloom of empty fields. Beyond the halo of imagined security created by man made light, we find a velvet pallet of indigos and inky black looking over what once was a soybean field. Scattered across the tapestry of the empyrean, pinpricks of ancestral celestials return our winking grins from the cloudless heavens. The half moon ladened cold of early November sinks between the three thousand fresh miles on our souls. Sparkling crystals of infantile frost twinkle between the awe in my love's eyes as they scan the impending darkness. For the first time, I am not the only intruder on this, the most clandestine of sacred secrets. As one, we breathe in the deafening, ringing silence of the early morning and bask in the stillness of the soul that comes from knowing that we alone share this moment. Only the stray warding lights here and there on the horizon betray the suggestion of other human life, and even then.... Their inhabitants have long retired to their fireside homesteads, not to stir until hours after he and I have drank our fill of their absence.

As our whispers pass from our lips, a lonesome howl of a coyote swirls down from the Northern Hills. A lone cow lows mournfully from an unseen field, her lamentation of fitting refrain to the soft melody of twenty six and two a.m. it's a sparse lullaby, with the percussive wind shushed to the occasional stretching sigh and no traffic to break the spell. However, the quiet does not leave the night lacking but rather the hush lends a certain... Reassurance to what could have easily been frightening. After such uncertainty, raw nerves and wringing hands the last few weeks have brought, I find that here, there is finally room for me to take a breath. And then another, and another until all my run ragged edges and frayed seams are stolen away, burned up by falling stars in the west. He feels it too, shivering there beside me in the Moonlight, as if suddenly he released a burden he didn't know he was carrying in the crunching footsteps of icy grass. And though we are shaking in our boots, blue lipped and teeth clacking... We both smile. For although this journey did not lead us where we thought we would end up, we feel like us again. We are perfectly alone together and everything is going to be okay.