Stone Circle Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

Can she beg him not to go? This is a desperate sensation she’d felt once before, after the storm, where a single path diverged into two and they’d each taken one and not the other. She hadn’t seen him since. What if she doesn’t get to see him again, and this is their parting memory?

It can’t be just this, though she knows asking for more is selfish. She cannot buy his time, even as her mind thinks on ways to do so, the gift of words that might anchor him here. She cannot give him what he wants- what a part of her still wants, too. And yet her lips will find the word when her voice does not: stay. It is a selfish one.

And because she is a selfish girl she will draw him into her arms and kiss the side of his face and hold him tightly, as she did when they’d first met.

But she can be kind, too. She can do that for him. He is too polite to leave her, though she understands that is what he needs. She will release him and move to offer space; time.

If her mouth opens, she knows it will be against these efforts. She says nothing.