The river lay below him as he stood, sandy riverbanks under his feet. Water rippled throughout, reflecting the gibbous moon above as it stared into him. Waxing or waning he never knew, never bothered. A temporary sanctuary of respite was enough to last for a few weeks, but today it didn’t seem enough. Memories made just hours prior replayed in his head, ones he wished to forever expel from his mind. Yelling and screaming and fights and tears he wished he never saw shed, tears he wished he himself had never shed. Water again pooled in the depths of his eyes, again rippling the otherwise still current as it fell into the stream. He sat on the sand, and as the moon shone above and the water sang with the north wind, he cried the hardest he had in years.

The clock ticked once, twice. Midnight. The end of yesterday, the beginning of today. She slowly descended onto the floor, ignoring the couch which lay about a foot away. 15 inches, if she cared to be precise. It was when her son became 15 that her forever dear husband had been finally put to rest. Mere months had passed since his passing, the weeks filled with denial, then sorrow, then anger. Misdirected anger, she hated to admit. What a perfect mother she had been, when the love of her life had been alive. If only the Earth stopped spinning in those moments, if the clocks no longer ticked and the moon no longer changed. But fights broke out over the smallest things; a crack in the wall, a poorly chosen word, a disagreement in the supermarket. Tonight had been a particularly bad outbreak, as he had left with tears in his eyes, a first for the both of them. She wished she could unhear every scathing remark made about her, wished she could take back all the vile words that were forced out of her body.

He wished to go back to when he knew someone loved him, all that time ago. She wished she knew how to love him, when her lover had not left the Earth. And the moon shone down upon both, the changing of the phases as unknown as the future of their fates.