The boy, who was now a man with a man's burden, had brown eyes. But they weren't just brown. They were dark honey, smooth and thick, or bear fur, soft and warm. They were oak bark and water muddied with intense emotion whenever he saw a piebald horse or a woman who wore pine-needle eyes and a fierce smile. When the alcohol took him, he had a history reflected back in those gold-brown orbs.
The girl had green eyes like cedar boughs, but she swore to herself and everyone else that they were grey. A scar, silver like a coin and well-worn memories, graced the skin under her left eye, a part of her story immortalized in flesh. Her spring-shadow eyes spoke in velvet tones of magic and lost loves and wild rides in the night on roads narrower than her smile. You need see the love of adrenaline written into her smirks and scars, just by looking at her and the way she ran through her days. Here was a woman who had lived a breathless life, had taken lovers and broken hearts. At night, her eyes glowed as she danced to the wild music of campfires and goat-hide drums.
The boy remembered her by the scar on his neck, the horse beneath him, by the scent of autumn. He remembered her like he remembered the dead. He's long ago stopped recalling the sharpness of her knife, the viciousness in her wildcat grin. He he remembered runs between trees, laughs on the wind, eyes brimming with life glowing in the dark. For him, she was gone. Lost. Unreachable.
She didn't remember him, in the same way she didn't remember why she sold her mother's knife, why she didn't think of the future. She didn't remember the way she'd left him, in a night of blood and broken promises. She didn't remember, so she couldn't regret it. In a way, it never happened to her.
They'd been comrades once. As close as siblings and twice as loyal. He lived in the past and exhaled memories. She made her home in the present and never thought there'd be another day.
