i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
He is not ignorant to the change in her expression.
He thinks to reach out and touch her, to press his mouth gentle against the slope of her shoulder, as if she might draw some comfort from it. As if he is not a dead thing and the mouth is not cold and stiff.
He does not know what it is that haunts her or pulls her features into a grimace. He does not dare ask either. He knows, perhaps better than most, that sometimes it is better to keep darkness barricaded inside of one’s self. So as to not force others to carry it. It does not occur to him, however, that offering to help carry it is something else entirely.
So, he turns his focus to the sunset instead. He is vaguely aware of the weight of her gaze. But he feels no stirring of bashfulness. Heat does not gather just beneath the surface of his skin – not that it could, even if it wanted to – and no color pools there either. He just goes on studying the horizon while she goes on studying him. He wonders what she sees. If she can see the way the shoulders bow beneath the weight of all he has carried with him over the years. He wonders if she can see the parts of him carved out by sadness and fear and guilt. She had touched him and said that it felt as if sadness seeped out of his pores. He wonders if she can see it, too.
He wants to say something. He wants to look at her and say, I know. I know that I am not much to look at. But it doesn’t matter, he thinks. Because he never was much to look at. Almost the spitting image of his father, which had always been burden enough. If only because his mother’s expression darkened each time she looked at him. Because she was not impervious to the hell his father dragged her through, regardless of how well she played the part.
And then, finally, he drags his focus away from the horizon and he turns back to her, armed with his question. Perhaps his heart might have clenched when she mentions her daughter if he were still a living thing. Because he has thought that he’s smelled his own daughter on the wind, only to round a corner and find himself just as dreadfully alone as he’d always been. He smiles now but it is a kind of sorrowful thing. He nods, vague, because he understands. “I know what you mean,” he says.
He exhales, forcing air out of his lungs that no longer operated, because he finds some small comfort in doing so. He does not know yet just how fiercely he will come to miss it, these primal things. The pang of hunger, the vicious want for water, the way the ribs ache when fully expanded around a deep breath.
The lands have changed. How it had devastated him to find that this Beqanna was not the Beqanna of old. Again, he nods. His gaze lingers heavy on her face one long moment before he glances toward the horizon again. “Maybe we can stay here a bit longer,” he murmurs. And then, without looking at her, adds, “I don’t think I’m quite ready to go yet.”
