The only exception.

The grey came in cold and pressing, clouds touching the rocks on the beach below with their wetness, leaving us on the shore damp, and chilled. I parked with my headlights pointed east to the city line, and looked north out at the melting and moonly expanse of ice and slush and garbage, floating in the quietly thawing lake. There was no point on the horizon where land or water became sky, or cloud gave way to white capped wave. All was obscured and blended together in a dingy white that crept in between the spaces of flesh and bone, carving out a stark and lonely outpost. A washed out photo from another century.

There was a small dark spot among the translucence of the melting snow, turning into ice with the rain. It caught my eye every now and then as it fluttered in the wind, some discarded garbage bag caught in the freeze. And then it moved, and then it moved again, and like all of those nights of figure-eights in isolation, some part of my mind put the forms together like a patchwork and I knew. I kept the car door open when I got out, and walked down the rain-slick pier to where it ended in the ice. The lake looked different so close-up, slush suspended in dirty runoff, the waste of three or four months floating on top of it all.

There was blood on the ice. Bright spots of crimson that made a technicolor trail to where he lay, dying. His coat was matted from the dampness and he looked around at me as I stood there, looking at him. Nothing that I could do. He floated on the tide about fifty or sixty feet off shore in a nest of snow he found when the lake had been frozen solid enough to walk on. A viking funeral, I thought, but sometimes there is no boat, sometimes you just have to make-do. The crushing greyness of it pressed in as it hit me again that there was nothing I could do. I thought of her photo from several summers ago of a solitary flower sprouting from a crack in the asphalt, and how there is always hope. And somehow in my mind it made sense that this stark image was my version of her parking lot, that the picture of ice and wave and blood and fur and bleakness inspired the same feeling of renewal. Even if it is impossible to elucidate. The world breaks everyone, we said, and it is not meant to be a condemnation, she said. Amen. And Thank God for you.

And then, later, what we thought the other meant by silence, and what we said, after it was explained. He lay next to me and pulled me close and in a moment of tenderness told me what his mind said to him, and how vulnerable he made himself. And I lay there with his heartbeat on my chest, and ran my fingers through his hair, and stroked his cheek, and chin, and could not look away from the blue of his eyes as we lingered there, in silence, after. I love you. And I wondered how it was possible for there to be so much convulsive beauty left in the world, ten years later and I was still shaken to the core by how fragile and perfect this life can be.