[mature] things we never thought we could be, adna

[bethlehem]

sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other? B E T H L E H E M then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago The apathy has been cultivated over a lifetime of aloneness. Not loneliness, per se. Because the brief periods of loneliness have always been rectified easily enough. The lonely are easy to find and they are so desperate for attention that they rarely ask much ofhim. No, it is not loneliness that has made him this way but rather the better part of a lifetime spent in his own company. The fact that he has scarcely ever been made to care about anything at all. So he hasn’t. He has never known the hurt that she has known. As far as he knows, there is no faultline at the center of him. There is a darkness, though, a darkness that he has never fully examined or attempted to understand. These things, he knows, are sometimes better left alone. She wears her darkness plainly. In the way she bares her fanged teeth. In the way she snaps at him. In the bitterness that drips thick from her words. He blinks at her, the smirk gone now. Not even a shadow of it remains as he studies her. The mouth is pressed into a thin, tight, contemplative line as he ruminates. Will he ever know? “I don’t think I’ve been looking,” he admits. He has walked so many thousands of miles and in all those miles he’s covered in all the years he’s been walking, he’s never found a place that has made him want to stay. “I don’t think I want to know.” Not even he knows if this is the truth.