Eyes Holding Worlds

I had no stories left to tell her. There were no more secrets of this, or of any other world, I could reveal to her. I had told her all my stories and taught her all I knew.

I’d stayed with her far longer than any of the others. I had travelled many lands, always on the move from my own land, far to the North, where the winters last for such a long time we do not know if the world remembers how to make a summer. Each new year I had moved on: leaving lands I’d come to know, leaving the women I’d come to love, to search for something I still could not name, despite all the stories I told, beside all the wonders of this world I had seen. There was still something out there, beyond me that I wanted, needed to grasp, to take into my hand and learn its secrets.

She, with the dark skin and the long black hair and the eyes that seemed to hold worlds inside them; worlds I could no touch or reach, held me here, here in this strange land where only the distant mountaintops seem to feel the winter. She listened to my stories and asked the questions I knew the answers to, about the world that lay beyond those mountains that brood over her lands like the homes of watchful gods.

She took everything I could offer her, but never asked for more, always satisfied with what I could give her, and so the years passed and we had children that grew, and a life like the others who scrape their living in the shadows of those mountains.

Many times I made plans for leaving, but instead would turn to travel into those countries in her eyes as her practiced elegant fingers retraced familiar routes across the maps of my body.

Each day that passes takes me further from those lands I have not seen, those people I have not met and all the wonders that lie beyond this land, but each night I return from our fields eager only to wander, lost, in the landscapes of her eyes.