Two of them are trying to become one creature before they are separated, and it will not work, though I admire the attempt. This is the small paved clearing where the walking ones gather to weep, just there, where the light falls through the great glass in a way that reminds me of a canopy, though it grows nothing.
They cling. Their hands are learning the shape of each other quickly, too quickly, the way a sapling learns a fence and grows around it, except they have no time, they never have time, they have minutes when they should have years.
One of them keeps letting go and then not letting go. I have seen this. A leaf does the same in a certain wind, releasing and catching, releasing and catching, until at last the wind decides for it.
I do not understand why one must go. In my long green memory nothing that is close chooses to be far. The root does not leave the soil to see other soil. But the walking ones are made this way, hurried and hollowed by some wind I cannot feel, and one of them will pass through a door that swallows people and does not give them back where I can see.
The other stays a while at the glass. Watches nothing. Then that one, too, walks off in the small quick way they have, already becoming a stranger to this hour.
I have held a thousand such partings in my shade, and I remember every face that has wept beneath me, which is more than they remember of each other in the end. The light will move. The season will turn.
And I will still be standing at this gate, holding the place where they stood, long after both of them have stopped walking anywhere at all.