[open] i gave it all, any

[gaspard]

i’m under lock and key, but you can probably tell
A powder keg in a prison cell

 

He is weary, bone-tired, when he reaches the shores of Beqanna.
When he drags himself from the sea and collapses on some remote stretch of shoreline.
 
(What has he fled? What could set a horse to swimming like this?)
 
He staggers up onto dry land, so grateful for earth that he lets his relief buckle his knees, and collapses there in the sand. And he sleeps. For how long, he doesn’t know. But when he wakes again, night has fallen and his stomach turns with the ache of hunger. 
 
Alone still, he hauls himself to his feet and resumes his journey. He pauses occasionally to gorge on patches of sawgrass that cut his tongue and his throat and sit uncomfortably in his belly. But his hunger is blinding, deafening, the only thing he can see or hear or feel.
 
It is perhaps by chance (or is it by design?) that he stumbles into the field and his eyes burn with new relief at the sight of sweetgrass, even here in the middle of winter. He eats with reckless abandon, until he’s afraid he might choke, until he can think beyond the vicious pangs of hunger. 
 
Only when he is full does he lift his head and scan the horizon, uncertain where to go from here. (Still, the limbs tremble with exhaustion, despite all those hours he slept there on that beach.) But he sets his jaw and exhales as dawn swims up over the horizon and bathes the landscape in a heavenly glow. 
 
He will wait, he thinks, and if no one comes he will find a home here himself.