[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 Her pain is so potent he can almost taste it. Everything in him begs to take one step backward, out of her orbit. So that it cannot leave its residue on his tongue. So that it cannot sink into the marrow of his bones. So that he will not have to feel it, too. But something shifts in the hollow cavern of his chest and he listens, stone-silent, as she speaks. He has not asked, but his suspicion is that she does not say it for his benefit. He does not try to stop her, does not try to still the words in her mouth, if only to spare himself the pain of it. Because he’d taken to walking because his father hadn’t wanted him and his mother certainly hadn’t either. And perhaps when he’d set out he’d been convinced he’d find someone who might kiss his troubled brow and quiet the storms that ravaged him. He is older now – significantly older now – and he has stopped searching for all the love he has lacked. He does not remove himself from her orbit. But he does not shift himself deeper into it either. Perhaps the appropriate response would be to reach out and touch her, to lay his mouth on his shoulder and exhale some warm breath that might suggest she is not alone. But they are all alone and the ones who think they are not are naive, he knows. He does not touch her and he does not commiserate. He just rolls the marble of her pain over the surface of his tongue and nods his understanding. “What will you do with it, then?” he asks without inflection. It is neither mocking nor challenging, it simply is. “That thing that was in your father and is in you, too?” he clarifies. “Will you lay the world to waste or will you accept the fact that sometimes our parents are wrong?” His throat tightens again, though he refuses to think that he might have meant his parents had been wrong, too. Wrong to not want him. Wrong to think him not worth loving.