[private] the salt and the sea, agetta

[kensley]

i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
i worshiped at the altar of losing everything

He remembers her now, just as he’d promised her that he would.
He sees her from some great distance,
(And wonders, too, if being a dead thing has somehow improved his vision.)
and moves toward her as if drawn to her by magnets.

He moves quickly, urgently, and if he were alive still perhaps his nerves would have thrummed with apprehension. Perhaps the breath would have hitched in the parched column of his throat and the heart would have leapt in its ribbed cage. But he is a dead thing now and the body does not react at all. He does not breathe, the nerves do not bristle, the heart does not stir. He moves quickly because he is eager to know if she came back a dead thing, too. Or if it had only been him.

He had seen her, they had exchanged smiles, as the lot of them collected on the beach at the foot of some great ghost. She had been lost to her own version of the afterlife when they’d stepped through the rift, though, and he had not seen her again. Until now.

How he aches for labored breath. He thinks he would give anything to feel the chest heaving as his strides eat up all of the space that separates them. He remembers how she’d asked him if he was a ghost, too. How he’d smiled ruefully and said, yes, I suppose I am. And now what is he?

“Agetta,” he murmurs, the voice thin without any breath to buoy it. The voice of a ghost, maybe. The voice of a dead thing. Hardly there at all. He smiles then. Or, he tries to. But it lists and fades before it ever fully comes to fruition. He can tell just by looking at her, though, that she is not a dead thing. If anything, he thinks, she is somehow more brilliantly white than she’d been before.

So, instead of asking if she came back anything like him, he merely says, “it’s so good to see you.”

i'm finding all this well-worn sadness i never knew i kept
and i still chase you into heartache every time you take a step