06-07-2019, 04:59 PM
and at once i knew
i was not magnificent
How peculiar, the way the wind shifts. How strange that when he lifts his head and shifts his gaze and sees her standing there, bathed in a beam of light, his expression does not register surprise. There is no pulse of shock and adrenaline does not pollute his sordid bloodstream. The expression softens, though. And there, in the furthest corners of his mouth (stained faintly still from all that blood), there is a stirring. The muscles quiver but he does not smile, though he tries.
For a moment, he simply studies her.
How beautiful she had always been. And even now, the angles of her face sharper, the fading light behind her eyes.
How fiercely he had loved her.
But they had learned the hard way, the two of them together, that love was never enough.
And this is what they have to show for it.
The wanderer and his ghost come back to him.
He does not react because he does not believe her real. He looks at her and he knows that she is nothing beyond a mirage constructed from all the wishing he, too, has done. All the pining. The vicious longing. His want has teeth and it has torn him apart, shredded what of his heart he had taken with him when he left (leaving the rest of it behind, of course, because it belonged to her).
She speaks and the sound of her voice is so sweet that it sets him ablaze. He had clung to it as fiercely as he could but it, too, had eventually been eroded by the passing of time and all the miles he’d wedged between them.
“Plumeria,” he whispers, the expression soft still, “of course I remember you.”
His beloved Plumeria.
“I miss you,” he says and admitting it out loud, telling her ghost, it cleaves his heart in two.
son of caden & fray
once-king of the hidden tundra