The Hike

by Lucy Clarke

They could have been twelve, or eighteen, or twenty-five. That was the magic of old friends: the years were stripped away.

You start choosing the parts of someone that you’d change or alter, and you realize those very parts are what also makes you love them.

If there had been a road to this beach, if they’d stepped out of a car, their pleasure at reaching this place would have been diminished. Joy was the reward that followed a struggle.

Wasn’t it that joy and struggle were so deeply enmeshed that you couldn’t experience one without the other?

Loneliness wasn’t the absence of people, she realized. It was the absence of people who understood you.

In a song, the most powerful note is silence. That moment of pause is when the meaning is communicated.