I noticed her walking to my side from behind me when I stopped to look below, at the fishermen throwing nets on the river. I did not notice her tailing me along the dirt trail. I did not smell the fragrance of jasmine that instills the air around her. Nor did I hear the chiming of knee high grasses tickling her legs and caressing her skirt.

She sat next to me drawing circles on the gap of the ground between us with her middle finger, stirring with it into the air, the aroma of jasmine that I inhaled with each drag of the cigarette I had in my hand. The dirt along the circle that she drew had started to coalesce into a slurry, and inside that circle were a couple of ants that seemed too confused as to why they were there in the first place.

The last few puffs of the cigarette raked the insides of my throat. I put the cigarette out in the middle of that circle and with it crushed one of the ants that had given up trying to get out of that fence.

I looked, for a while at the other ant that listlessly rummaged within that tiny confinement. For a while more as it tried desperately to escape that miniature mire. I looked, then at her and then at her as she placed her hand softly on my shoulder. I looked at her smiling and looked at her still, even when tears started brimming from the corners of her dark brown eyes. Looked at her even though I wanted to look back because she was not real. I looked at the skin below her neck, at the beautiful collarbone of hers, curves of which I could only trace in my imaginations; because she was not real.

The grass underneath her thighs started to turn brown and it crumbled as she leaned towards me. Her phantasmal glow had started to dim. Her skin began to weather with the wind and the smell of jasmine slowly faded away.

The clouds were not happy today. They did not smile at me when I looked up. I couldn’t possibly understand what engulfed them with such tender gloom that they looked to me, as though they would burst at the slightest touch of wind. My presence at that place seemed not to matter to them any more.

Anyway, I was not there because I liked the clouds. I was there because, faces familiar and unfamiliar alike, scream at me and the noises echo in the holes under my eyes. Because there I could see the shepherd-girl hopping around with her cattle on the cliff opposite. There I was with the dragonflies that drifted with the wind and with the kingfishers that dipped into the river below. And there a butterfly would greet me every once in a while and there I could pluck the wildflowers that bloom every morning only so that I could mash them between my fingers. There I could dangle my legs and waltz with the cicadas singing in the bushes behind. There I could breathe and there I could disappear for a while.