Love Letters to the Secretly Admired: Mountain Man - Preview

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To the One Who Clears the Fog from the Mountain. Since long before I arrived in this place, their voices have echoed here and beyond. This is a sea-bound town that receives visitors seemingly from all corners of the earth, myself included.

A constant stream of storytellers comes in, some with voices high and clear as Gabriel's horn, and still others that seem to rumble the very earth on which they stand. Each a welcome but brief distraction from the mundanities of daily life. My traitorous mind has a habit of becoming bored and complacent, drifting from place to place in a half-hearted attempt to stir my soul and capture my fantasies.

When I first arrived here, I'd settled in a little side street, content to spend my days hanging over a windowsill to observe the goings-on in the square, and my nights in an exhausting, suffocating, cloud-like haze of twisted sweat-damp sheets, voyeuristically musing on the highs of these traveling storytellers, and mapping their words across my skin, over and over and over, until my brain is too much a soup to notice anything around me. It's fitting, then, that when I first truly heard your call, the sun was high, the sky was clear, and my windows happened to be open to let the wind sweep through. I'd been making a valiant effort to clear the dust and cobwebs from the beautiful high-arched ceilings of my home, muttering to myself about something or other.

It just so happened the single record I'd had spinning for days and days skipped right from the turntable. I heard a new voice move through the echoing silence like a knife through butter. I must admit, if only to you, that I'd stopped in my tracks.

With barely a thought, I sidled up against the curtains and peeked around the window's edge to listen to your tale. Your audience pressed in around you tightly, and you were completely invisible to me from the fringes. The day passed easily as I stood by the window, eyes closed and hands pressed together, as I took in your every word, feeling as though I could scarcely let out a breath until night fell and the air was finally quiet, even as it became tinged with the smells of flowers thrown at your feet.