i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
He no longer understands time.
Though, it’s hard to say if he ever really did.
He wonders how much time it takes for a land to be forgotten. How many generations have come and gone to erase their names from their stories, their memories? He does not know how to find an answer, so he merely offers up another slanted smile that lists dangerously to one side before it disappears altogether. “It is strange,” he concedes and then goes quiet.
He has not thought about it much, if he’s being honest. Home. He has wandered because his need to move is the only thing he inherited from his father (other than the color of his coat, the color of his eyes). He left Beqanna before everything collapsed and then rose again in different order. He raised his daughter and then he went in search of something he could not identify. He had not given himself the chance to be homesick. Perhaps because he believed that, should he ever come back, Beqanna would be just as he’d left it. Strange that he should feel homesick now, he thinks.
He drags in a shuddering breath with her question, tilts his head in her direction as he considers it. It is hard to think about coming back without revisiting the reason why he’d come back. The useless heart in his chest – which still beats, peculiarly – constricts and he clears his throat. “I just came back,” he says. Because he’d been desperate for the comfort of home. “I didn’t expect things to be so different,” he adds and it comes out skewed, sideways, as if spoken from someplace far away as he turns his gaze toward the horizon.
“But,” he says, rather abruptly, as if trying to save them both from the impossible depths of their shared sadness (because he can see it in her, too), dragging his focus back to her face, “I guess it’s more than a little naive to come back to things expecting them to be exactly as you’d left them.”
