Spain had, for decades upon decades, always prevailed upon his older brother to come spend the summer months with him in his smaller rural towns and Portugal (sometimes less than politely) turned him down each time; it was difficult to tell at times whether Spain’s insistence stemmed from actual fraternal concern or his immense desire for an excuse to pelt his brother with tomatoes at some seasonal festival.
It was likely both at once, Portugal decided, because Spain felt several things all at once and always passionately, but never intensely. So he could not understand, with his own unbearable lightness of feeling, Portugal’s desire to spend the first week of August wandering the Ponta de Sagres’ sheer cliff lines while barefoot, kicking white pebbles into the sea.
Spain had had all the riches of the New World but he had never had a golden boy, so Portugal did not wonder which of them had truly been richer; in the end, they’d both let precious things slip through their fingers and mourned that they could not follow.
If there were still miracles, Portugal mused, it was in the small things that came as naturally as breathing.
Pansies smaller than a fingernail growing between the cracks in the pavement.
The seeds in an apple core touching so that they formed a heart when it was sliced open.
A shooting star in the daylight.
Miracles like whatever had caused an endless number of white pebbles to collect together here on this high spit of land just for Portugal to cast them back into the sea. Or miracles, he thought wryly, like a hair-band that actually held hair back instead of letting the wind tear it from its queue and whip it into a wild frenzy around his face.
Small miracles were in the lack of tourists this day brought, though it maybe had something to do with the fierce gale winds and the steely clouds billowing ominously on the horizon, cast into sharp relief by flashes of lightning in their innards.
And there was poetic justice in that, he believed, that a storm would build itself up into something terrible and frightening and destructive and then spend itself out flooding the fields so that people could devour its corpse whole.
Or poetic justice, he mused as he bent to pick up another stone and throw it into the sea below, like knowing you had a golden boy and losing him anyway.
Your most beloved mortalities will never return to you and they will never understand that they can’t.
It’s made obvious by the quiet whispers in the dark, murmured into that soft patch where neck meets shoulder. He wants to say he can’t still feel the phantom brush of lips against his skin. Maybe he would just consider that another small miracle, one as transient and fading as a shooting star in daylight, the seeds of an apple core touching to make a heart, pansies smaller than a fingernail growing between the cracks in the pavement.
The breathing of your most beloved mortalities.
