I will not rescind a wordPre-dawn coffee from the firepit with Diabhal, who is soft-spoken and completely willing just to spend the time this morning. We've made toast with melted cheese directly on the grill over the fire and I give the ashes a stir, my own version of a dark zen garden, tracing patterns in the embers, envisioning them as water flowing black over my ruminations, eroding my efforts to shut him out as he deserves to be, these days.
Of what I've said
For the vultures overhead
But for every line I vent
Another ten
I'm afraid I'd lose you then
The coffee is good. Hot, rich, tempered with just a little sprinkle of brown sugar. The bread is sawed rough from a round loaf of sourdough, broken with his hands into pieces small enough to eat, the cheese cut with his pocketknife and balanced on each piece of bread until soft enough from the flames to melt into the crumb just the way I like it.
The dawn is beautiful. The sun bursts quietly through the lavender-grey horizon gently and without announcement, casting a beautiful glow on our faces, erasing years, lines and deeds in a brief instant before casting shadows once again as it chases the moon out of the spotlight.
He's done it. He took a strongarmed action and strangled it off, returning to the patient Devil, to the reactive instead of the proactive emotional strategy he usually feeds off.
I watch him as I sip my coffee. He watches me back. Almost imperceptibly he nods. As if this is good enough, if this is going to be the way it is. He has softened around his sharp edges, mellowing at last, aging gracefully into what I always hoped he would be, but what I figured would always be just another daydream for a little girl looking out the window as the road wound like a ribbon around her life. She wanted to put the Devil in her pocket, along with the crushed paper cone from the cotton candy, and the seven pennies she found underneath the window at the ordering counter of the ice cream shop, so that she would always know exactly where he was, and he'd never be able to surprise her again. Then she would take her sticky hand and thrust it into Lochlan's and they would be safe.