The book we've written together has never been published. It sits on a shelf gathering dust and hosts vague, silky, fragile cobwebs as time settles on the pages and encases it for unseen eyes. Our book might be private but we never wished it to be that way. 

Where does one begin to describe the first page? The first sentence of a book written in life that no one has or will read. It would make for a great journey but then again most lives are seductive if we allow ourselves time to peruse them. 

There is a desert for that I am confident. And music -always music. There are pages where time flutters and flies through like leaves tumbling from Aspen trees in Flagstaff once Fall comes to call. There are journeys into places where no one else goes. Isolated. There are small creeks in Arizona. Pools pure and welcoming  our naked trusting bodies. There is silence and laughter on the page and numerous chapters where nothing much happens but all the time the protagonists are surely in love. They write miles of stories by just being. They sit on hills and watch sunsets and drive over dusty roads just to prolong the journey, the miles of road calling them on.

They fly over oceans to another land and find themselves in a green place surrounded by stone and mist and water and rain and lamb stew and contradictions. They struggle. Try to find the meaning in the mystic. It baffles and throws them off course for a while. But sure enough the upset only comes back as triumph and soon they are wiser and more in tune than they were when their skin was turning almond brown in the sun of the Southwest.

They reared three sons in the new place. They were proud of that. They chose to live without religion and without its restraints. They baulked at tradition, seeking only answers in nature and the changing of the seasons.  And the sons grew into fine young men, strong of mind and spirit, void of hate and bitterness and they took solace to know that wherever you live you can carve your own path. The conviction wins out and so now the book is half full, maybe more than half full and still the pages won't settle, still they cry out for the next chapter and still there is no fear in that  because the next chapter rushes in like all the years in our life, flicking by, fluttering, rustling like the skimming of  tiny pieces of paper on a pavement with our lives scribbled on them, hastily written in love that could become oceans of novels, stories and events that will never even be known. Not even considered necessary.