You were right, it is good to just sit down.

Staring up at the clouds we could smell the grass growing around us. We could smell that sharp silica, and the long ages the grass had grown on that hillside. Somewhere across the field a pine tree was growing. In the air between us and the tree, riding on the gentle currents of wind, was a saffron sea of pollen. When the wind picked up it looked liked the tree was evaporating into the blue sky above. 

We didn't talk about anything for a long time. Words came out, there were topics and sentences, but we might as well have been quiet. Eventually we were. We fell silent, staring up at the clouds. I knew you were trying to figure out roles for the clouds to fill. You're always finding, or trying to find, patterns in things. Remember that time you went through Jean Dutourd's The Horrors of Love? You circled every first letter of a page and told me it meant something. In the end you couldn't find an anagram for anything meaningful, but that didn't stop you believing.

In the silence of the clouds we didn't need to care about our lives. We didn't need to care about the war, or your father's drinking. I didn't feel those uncomfortable desires to move closer to you, to run my hands through your hair, and try to kiss you on the cheek, and then maybe the lips. All the problems of the world melted away into the blue sky above. The gun felt lighter in my hand than it ever had. There was no meaning beyond the moment. There was nothing to attach to the memory except the memory itself.

When I look back on it now, sitting in my prison cell, I wonder where you've gone. To pass the long endless nights I remember that day in the field. I stare up into the blue sky of my memory and everything falls away, up past the clouds.