The Horizon Keeps Rearranging
We Never Quite Reach the Horizon
We’d walk, talk.
A pattern taking shape through young questions asked on city sidewalks, lamplit streets, paths through parks. Love, it seemed, was giving each other our best answers.
By our third house we started walking to the lake. That’s when it changed. We’d choose a bench, watch the water pointlessly shift with the wind. He noticed how tired I was. I noticed him strained. The questions were harder to shape, the answers no longer satisfying.
We had arrived. Small classic Georgian Colonial. Safe and leafy, geometric neighborhood. Healthy kids. Success in business. That bench held the weight of what couldn’t be ignored. The water never once told us how.
We never quite reach the horizon. Recently we drove from the Appalachian Mountains through Georgia Piedmont to the Atlantic Coastal Plain. The horizon kept rearranging itself.
There is a stretch before the coast. It’s flat, pine-forested, dotted by lonely marshes. That day winter-brown, scrubby. Here the horizon gapes. Wide, harsh, uncomfortably empty of people.
Then, Savannah — alive, inhabited, unexpected.
The house went. In a single day we sold its contents, leaving one box for the thrift store. Then we traveled for a long while, zigzagging a way as we went. A new pattern emerged, uncomfortable, annoying at first. We’d walk, talk. A question. Then only: we’ll see.
Returning from Savannah, the land shifts back. It begins flat. Marshes give way to pine, pine to red clay, red clay to where our life is now. The horizon keeps rearranging.
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