Do you remember the snow, and the dreams we shared before the arrival of daylight? We were nestled together in our tent. I smelled tobacco in your hair. As you slept, you made sounds—almost speech, but I understood nothing of what you said. They were pleasant sounds. I remember those. I held you close, and in sleep, your hands groped, dragging your arms behind their motion. You embraced me. I remember that, too, because of the smell. Tobacco in your hair. Sweat. It was yours and it was mine. It was like the salt-stink of ocean air and the iron in our blood. It is funny how I remember that smell, that salt-and-blood smell that will always be ours. We were so much younger then. The world lay before us. There was unlimited potential. We saw it everywhere. We didn’t know the troubles to come. We didn’t know about the war. All we knew was our secret scent. Salt-and-blood. I look back and I realize that I’d change nothing. Maybe we were foolish in our dreams. Maybe we should have joined our companions, but in doing so, we would have fought one another. We might have died, and become heroes in the process. Instead, we sheltered in our tent, and I smelled tobacco in your hair. I held you close as you held me in slumber. I like to think that I was guarding your dreams, but in truth I was simply afraid to move, afraid to break the spell that you’d cast around us. When the war came, the snow was melting. There was sunlight and clean air. There was the scent of tobacco in your hair. I could taste your kiss, lingering, lingering, lingering on the pink meat of my tongue. I held my lips closed and my mouth open, as if to cradle the kiss we’d shared. You told me about the border, how close it lay. You told me we could make it there and claim neutrality in the conflict brewed between our stupid nations. And we went to the border, with no more than what we carried. We hunted for rabbit and squirrel. We feasted on dove and melted snow for water. You smoked. I smoked. And on the last day before the border, we saw ice sculptures. We saw dead things frozen in crystal. You touched one such sculpture: something like a weed-husk growing through the heart of a misshapen diamond. You told me that one day you’d give me flowers, that one day you’d weave a wreath and place it upon my head as we circle the altar three times and kiss beneath a priest’s blessing. I never told you that I saved that dead husk of a weed. I never told you that I melted its ice and placed the sprig of dead plant in the pages of my journal. It was wet for a time and the ink of my written ruminations smeared and ran. Ran and dried. I never mentioned it to you. I thought you’d laugh. We crossed the border and found safety even as our own nations quarreled. We found work. We found new names for ourselves. We found work. And now…so many decades later, we are old men. Your hair is silver now, and as I lean close, I can smell it. You’ve stopped smoking. Long ago. But as I close my eyes, I can imagine the linger of tobacco in your hair. Now, in our old age, I have retrieved the journal I hid. I found the dead weed I placed in its pages. I remember the ice, the way it looked in sunlight and shadow. I remember the touch of your fingers on mine. I remember the scent of Tobacco In Your Hair. I loved you when I smelled it. I love you now, even without the scent. We are different men with different names, but a dead weed stands between us: it is our bond. I took it from you, in its cocoon of ice. I hid it in my written words and thought nothing more of it. And now, as we sit together in silence, in a home we earned because we refused the enmity of our idiot nations, I stroke your fingers, as you stroke our weed. Can you feel the ice? Can you feel my flesh as I’d first touched yours on that day so long ago? *** As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting. Feel free to zoom.