Moonlight

Twenty-Two

Tom and Alice walked into the taxi. She was snuggled closed to him. He had his arm wrapped around her shoulder, and she was holding his hand. They looked like two teenagers coming home from their first date. And they feel like it too.

There was no past to burden them, no future to worry them. They both felt in charge.

They were no longer afraid of change, because they made that change: they were free to govern themselves, and to respect each other's limits and to hold each other accountable for their actions. They had broken away from the wealthy and their riskless, dull lives. And they had not fully joined the ranks of the people who worked with their hands. They had broken away with any convention: they were free to express their desires, their pleasure and their pain. This was their only privilege: the freedom to be themselves.

It wasn't freedom despite others: they didn't want to skirt their responsibility towards other human beings anymore. They didn't just want to know that the limit to their own freedom was the freedom of others. Tom and Alice knew that freedom was now built together.

They were now both ready to learn from each other, to trust each other's judgment; and they were ready to change together.

'Isn't the moon strange?' Alice asked.

Tom looked up.

'Is it?'

'Just out there, suspended into nothing, not going away but not coming any closer, showing us a bit more every day, until our shadow gets in the way again...'

Tom gave her a little, affectionate squeeze with his arm.

'Mother, wife... Whore, mystery... I get it.'

She burrowed in further into him, pleased that he understood her so deeply now.

'And what about you?' she asked.

It was an idle question: now she knew him. He needed to be guided, and he was capable of guiding. He could be submissive and could be exacting. Just like she needed him at different time, as she too showed a different side of herself to him.

'You'll find out,' he said.

Then, they enjoyed the rest of the ride home. The silence was now and then broken by a contented sigh, or by a soft, quiet word said almost in a dream.