"Rusted Gates"

By S.W. Martin

 "He placed his hand on the old metal gate that led out into the field in which he lived a thousand lifetimes as a boy. The blue paint now faded and chipping, rust now creeping along its surface, its hinges creaking as he slowly opened it. The grass was high and unkempt, not like it was when he was a boy.  

He thought about that summer evening when he was 17. The two of them walked through that field and up to the hill where that single oak once stood tall and green.

They were so young, and full of zeal for life, and a fervor for the unwritten future. So naive, but not quite innocent.

The gold of her hair was almost luminous in the evening sun. Her eyes were as green as these fields he'd spent so much of his young life. Maybe that's why he loved looking so deep into her eyes, every time he did it was like going home. 

She had conquered his soul, and planted her flag in his heart, and he welcomed her empire with adulation. 

At the top of the hill, as the sun retreated below the horizon and a slight coolness slipped into the breeze, she took him by the hand and pulled him to her. She smiled and asked him if he'd ever kissed a girl. He lied and said yes. She laughed and told him he was a bad liar. And she kissed him, warm and sweet. Her warmth ran through him like lightening, igniting a wildfire, a glorious destruction burning away the boy, and in its wake would be a man. As it so goes between a boy and girl, they took each other into the wildlands...where a kiss leads to something more...and there underneath that oak they let that wildfire burn. 

It ruined him for a lifetime. Never would a woman beguile him the way she did for the rest of his days And he knew it as soon as she did it.  

He wanted her and he felt like that perfect moment would always there, like an imprint onto the fabric of reality. That point of space and time would always be there, and it would be theirs.

But that was a long time ago, and time can't be stopped or held like a keepsake. 

He had held her that evening under the oak, the flesh against one another, he was the shoreline and her body was a ship that seeked refuge within his arms. He had, in a moment of ill timed euphoria, gently brushed back her golden hair and whispered into her ear, "I want this to be forever." She didn't reply, and he thought maybe she had fallen asleep. 

She had not...she laid there...thinking about forever. Forever in a place she would never truly be fulfilled, forever with someone she was fond of, but maybe just short of truly loving. 

Forever seems obtainable until one truly reaches out to grasp it, and it fades away like smoke in the night. It was back when the grass was well kept, and the oak stood tall and proud on the hill and he still believed in true happiness and the notion that all things happen for a reason. 

People's paths run parallel for a time, and then diverge and move away from one another. 

In time, she was gone. She had left their graveyard of a small town and found her path took her...to where? He didn't know. But he knew that it was whatever the furthest place was from that field, that oak tree, and his arms. 

He stood on the hill where the oak once was, and the remnants of its old stump peeked up from the grass.

He was older, not much wiser. Still making many of the same mistakes he had made all those years ago, Not a single lesson learned. 

He did not think of her every day. 

 But he did think of her when he thought about home, and the farm and the field and that noble oak on the hill. 

He walked slowly back down to the gate, and looked back. The horizon was getting dark with a thunderstorm moving in from the west. He closed the old rusted blue gate, and hung a "For Sale" sign on it.