XX. A painter approached after the lecture, casual as weather. “There’s a place I go to paint. Never told anyone about it. Would you like to see?”
A poet nodded, curious about this strange professor whose office walls held hundreds of the same untitled view.
“Don’t tell me your name,” a painter said. “This place doesn’t need our names.”
A poet tilted their head, confused but intrigued, and followed.
XXI. At the falls, a poet’s breath caught. Looked at the rocks, the perfect perch, the way the mist wrote temporary poems. A painter pulled out a notebook, weathered, pages soft with spray:
things that stay infinite: the butterfly’s time without a name for waiting us, before you ask what we are
The handwriting unmistakable. A poet looked at a painter, understanding settling like sediment after violence.
The embrace was brief, fierce, salt mixing with spray. No words could survive that beautiful violence.
A painter pulled back, smiled, pointed to the rocks, mimed writing, then walked away alone for the first time in twenty years, but not lonely.
The place had found its echo.
XXII. A poet came back. Tuesday. Thursday. The same stolen hours, the same sacred silence. Writing poems without titles, sending them into the spray like messages in bottles meant for no one, meant for everyone.