thirteen moons

"We lay all night talking together until the first color of morning, and then we slept an hour or two, and when we awoke, everything below was a white ocean of fog.
We boiled coffee atop one of only a few sunlit islands. And then the fog lifted out of the valleys and the folded world revealed itself and went on as far as the limits of sight permitted.

We spent three nights sleeping out on the bald, living like angels, high above the corrugated world, bathed in various hues of light from dawn to dawn, privileged to be young at the highest pitch of green summer.

We had taken little food and a single pot and a few blankets, but many books.
Had it been rainy, we would have been miserable.
The days, though, were blue.
And the nights silver, lit by the briefest full moon of the year, arcing so bright across the sky that we read by it, both of us mad with words in whatever form, poems or tales.
Sometimes we read to ourselves and sometimes to each other."

"As far as I knew, we would go on endless. Youth and night and wild freedom and not one real worry yet intruding our thoughts.
Riding with the certainty that life could be a stream of such moments, a dream forever.
I thought we could ride beyond the endurance or even the mortality of our horses.
Beyond the mortality of ourselves."

-thirteen moons by charles frazier