The Early Wine Days (excerpt)

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he poured wine into two glasses that did not match.

This was the start of the early wine days.

A season with its own climate.

A small pocket of time where nothing felt entirely real.

The kitchen light sometimes took on a muted blue, as if filtered through deep water. The air would still itself and we both fell silent at the same second, the way animals pause when the world shifts.

He told me the pieces of his early life.

Not the war.

Never directly.

Only small mentions.

A night in the jungle that never ended.

The taste of canned fruit in the heat.

A sound he still hears sometimes when he wakes.

The kind of memories that arrive already stripped down, already pared to the bone.

I learned to listen the way he spoke.

Indirect.

Careful.

Half inside another world.

I told fragments of my own.

Ending after ending.

Loss in the shape of a country.

He never asked for the missing parts.

After each night he went to his room.

I went to mine.

The distance between us held.

The silence felt ritual.

Two people returning to their separate camps after sharing the same fire.