[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 Perhaps he should be grateful. Grateful that she has come along and saved him from trying to remember this thing that does not want to be remembered. Grateful, in some way, that she has taken her pain and injected it into the place in his chest where his heart had lived once. He is not built for this, not really. He is not built for sympathy or compassion. He does not know how to relate to her except to dredge up the sediment of his own pain. Pain he has kept buried for so long that there had been some small part of him that had forgotten it had existed at all. He had convinced himself early on that he didn’t need anyone and he has lived his entire life subscribed to this false belief. So, for that reason, he cannot be thankful that she has saved him from the wreckage of his thoughts. Because this is so much worse. He focuses hard on her pain. He lets it consume him. He lets her own it, but he allows it to belong to him, too, if only for the moment. So that he will not have to think about how fiercely he’d longed for love once. It had brought him to the edge of ruin and he’d clawed his way out so viciously that he’d bled with the effort. She laughs and it catches him off-guard. Perhaps more off-guard than the vitriol she’d spat at him to set this bizarre series of events into motion. He is neither wise nor kind. He is not personable or friendly. There is something in him that speaks of arrogance, even. There is no reason for her to share this with him, except that he had been there and he had been willing to invest himself in the rot of all that pain. He does not know if she’s being sarcastic but he assumes that she’s not when he shrugs a shoulder, says, “that isn’t surprising at all.” He has no doubt that she’ll make it known if it had, in fact, been said facetiously. She turns a question on him and the nostrils flare but he does not allow himself the luxury of squirming. How viciously he wants to! How viciously he wants to reorient his weight beneath the yoke she straps across his shoulders. Were his parents wrong? Moments earlier, he would have said yes. They were. They should have loved him. They should have wanted him. But now? Now he shakes his head. He shakes his head and he casts his gaze in the direction of the horizon. “No, I don’t think they were.” He offers no elaboration .