I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
There is a pulse in the earth.
If she stands still enough, she swears she can feel it.
Never mind that it compounds the ache in her chest. Never mind that sometimes she holds her breath so long that it makes her vision swim. Never mind that she can never seem to make anything last. Can never make anyone – including herself – stay.
She has tried to smile. Every once in awhile she has opened her mouth to strike up a conversation with a stranger only for them to skirt just out of earshot, unaware that she’d even been there at all. She inherited this from her father, too. This great well of sadness at the very center of her. She’s lost all of his kindness, the softness he had pressed into her bones in the earliest days, when it had just been them. When she could still remember what his voice sounded like.
She has nothing left of him now except this. The loneliness that spreads like disease through her veins. Even now, as she moves slow toward the river. And perhaps she ventures there because it is where she’d found Velkan after weeks of searching for him. Because it is the last place she felt any rippling of happiness in that vast sea of sadness.
He is not here now and whatever flowers might have bloomed along the bank are buried beneath a thick blanket of snow. She hopes that he’s safe and warm, wherever he is. There is a thin sheet of ice along the shoulder of the river and she edges her way across, slow and careful, to dip her mouth into the water and drink. The water, frigid, burns all the way down. Festers in her gut.
The ice splinters under her feet and she scurries backward, a frightened gasp lodged in the aching column of her throat as she casts herself away from the river’s edge.
lilian
