The old man sloped along like a tortoise, and I followed him, and I watched him with my eyes half closed, like a daydream. His soul was full of dust, and on the crest of every hill we crossed, I watched waves of dirt blow off of him. We were both sweating, and it felt as though we were slowly being crushed between the red rocks and the warm sun. Every so often he looked back at me and smiled, his face splitting into a ridiculous grin, his few teeth exposed and eroding in the wind.
Dadum
Dadadum dum daDum.
I didn’t know if I was listening to his heart beat or mine. In one of his hands he was holding lilacs, in the other, a broken branch that he had fashioned into a cane. He was making his way towards the ocean, with me trailing behind him, a shadow, and I could almost smell the salt in the water, even if it was only some distant memory or a breath from my childhood. The heat pressing down on us was nauseating, making us more vulnerable and careless, inducing motion sickness; weeding us through time in slow motion. But our hearts beat on, despite the fact that I had no way of knowing if we were living or dead, if it was his heart beat or mine that I heard, or if I had been following him for so long that they beat hypnotically in unison.
Eventually, he turned to me and smiled.
“My name is Eduviges," he said. "Come with me. I’ve lost myself.”
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