04-08-2023, 01:24 PM
these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—
It is evident in the pale gaze, the lean muscle, the flare of the nostrils.
Because he had been weary once, tired; because he had thought to step outside of the cowardice he’d worn his whole life.
He cannot shirk the stench of Death anymore. It is a permanent thing, it has grown roots around the ribcage, sunk teeth into the meat of his heart. There is no outrunning it and he has been forced to accept it. There will always be that ache, that understanding, the flicker of a memory just outside of his grasp.
He has not seen Mazikeen in years, though he is certain that he would still feel the burning, the stutter of an arrested heart. Nor has he seen his mother, though the memory (not his, no, never his) of her death would still take him to his knees. And his sister, Este, he knows she would still smell faintly of the death that had nipped so greedily at her heels in the darkness.
(Has he avoided them? Perhaps. Perhaps he is merely a coward in new ways, different ways. Perhaps this is not something he will ever outgrow.)
He wanders, as he has for years. But he does not skirt borders in fear any longer. Not as he had as a child, terrified he might be cast out but even more terrified of what lay beyond the borders of the only home he’d ever known.
He thinks bitterly of the child he’d been. (Had he ever really been a child? Surely he had never known the unfettered innocence that children are meant to worn so casually. No, he had sprung forth from the womb already weighted down by the understanding that he would never know peace, not really.)
He wanders because he no longer has a home. And does he want one? Or is he still frightened?
—I just bite my tongue a bit harder
