i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
He should have asked.
He should have asked how long she’s been here.
How long she’s had that look on her face.
How long she’s carried this same great, terrible sadness.
But she offers up an answer in her own way. A friend had told her that it would get easier, she says, and he smiles again but it is a tired and rueful thing. He shakes his head almost imperceptibly and he looks away. Would he have come back here if he’d known that there was nothing left for him here? Or would he have continued to wander until his legs gave out? He imagines himself lying prone in the desert, praying for a death that would never come.
“Do you think you’ll stay?” he asks, turns his focus back to her face. She has a friend here, he realizes, and maybe this is enough to convince most people to grow roots. But he’s never known what that’s like, has never known how to stay in one place too long. But will he stay here? Here in the last place he saw his mother, his twin, his daughter, his heart. He doesn’t know and it injects a new sense of mourning into the marrow of his bones.
“Do you think it’ll get easier?” he adds before she’s had a chance to answer his first question. He does not recognize the sense of desperation bursting and swelling in the column of his throat but he supposes it must be born from sadness. Because he’d give anything for something to hold onto.
And then, after a beat of silence, he asks, finally, “how long have you been here, Agetta?”
He asks it quiet, though he’s not sure why. Perhaps because he wants to know if there’s hope for him, too.
