11-06-2019, 08:45 PM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; She strikes a chord with her words, an unknowing one. He’s looked for familiar faces too, since returning, and found nothing but strangers. One of them, he loved, but she left – no surprise – and everyone else has been fleeting, unwilling to engage with a thing such as he, for which he does not blame them. It's hard, to be so old, worse still when his body doesn’t reflect it, remade as it was. It was easier, when he was sway-backed and gray-flecked, because the old age was a promise that things were coming to an end. Now, he is back, filled out and sleek and dark as coal, and there is no end in sight. (He knows he could finish the job himself, yet he doesn’t – cowardice, perhaps, or a base instinct too deeply rooted to overcome.) “Have you found anyone? That you used to know?” he asks, almost hopeful. Maybe she had, and maybe he could find hope in that. Not that he knows who he’s looking for. He has a dozen loves, his heart well-versed in the art of being broken, but they had left him, and if they reappeared, well, surely they would turn their backs and leave, again. (Tabytha had come back, but she was dead twice over, and he has no hope of her return. He only thinks of her sometimes, and aches.) She turns the question back around on him, and he considers. Truth is, he doesn’t know if he has a reason, other than the stifling, wretched boredom of his existence, but such things cannot be confessed to strangers, not if he wants her to stay, if only for awhile longer. “I was tired of being alone,” he says – too honest – and it is still a sugarcoated truth, for he doesn’t speak of how grief is a weight upon him, constant, how solitude only makes it grow, cancerous. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |
@[Agetta]