i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
He has lived so long as a shadow that he doesn’t know how to be anything else.
Will he also find new roots here?
Will he find anything here worth staying for?
But she thinks that there is hope for him, too, and that has to count for something.
He had loved once and he had done it fiercely. He had hinged his heart on the edge of Anaxarete’s darkness, let it consume him and had known better than to ask for anything in return. Perhaps he is naive, too, to think that love is the only thing in the world that matters.
He drags in a shuddering breath and he nods but remains quiet for several moments. “I’m glad I found you,” he says and then that same tired smile, slanted and listing, sad. He studies her face, commits the soft plains and angles to memory. He will remember her the next time he sees her and he will not have to question how he knows her. He will consider her a friend, he thinks, even if only in passing. Two lost souls trying to find their way back to a world that made sense.
He swallows thickly. “I don’t think you have to worry about ever being nothing,” he adds after a brief pause. Rolls one shoulder in a kind of shrug, finally looks away. From anyone else, it might have been considered flirtatious. But, coming from him, it is merely a quiet observation. “You strike me as the sort of woman who will always have a future.”
And him?
He’s not so convinced.
“Even if the rest of the world forgets you, you’ll always have at least one wayward friend who remembers you.” He smiles again, a breathless thing as he looks back at her.
And then a storm in his heart passes a cloud over his face and exhales, long and slow. “Even if there is no future for me here, my past was here. My family, the woman I loved, our daughter. Even if they’re not here anymore, this is the last place I ever saw them and I guess that’s enough to keep me.”
