take off like the bird you are;
beyond the horizon,
looking toward Port Angeles,
lights
in the cold,
lights
in the night--
the sound of chat and crackling fire
wafting across Dallas Beach
as we use the
lights
on our phones to navigate nature's cragged stairwells,
up and down and up and down;
the relief,
the respite,
came from the snowblind-white patches of
light,
that we would then soon decline and hop to softer sand below.
There's a relief in going uphill when
physics
means you must come down;
tho I think of these remembrances,
spasmodic, fragmented memories of 3 and a half years together
I realize you and I had faced a bigger battle
---one that terrified us both--
as to whether we should
part ways
as if it were perhaps
long
overdue--

but there's no relief in an incline like that.
We'd have been walking uphill both ways.    

and now we  are
in the dark
with nothing but the
lights
of our phones

walking uphill
*like we had a choice.