06-13-2019, 12:24 AM
and at once i knew
i was not magnificent
Finally, he smiles. It is a rueful thing, steeped in sorrow.
As she insist that she is real and he begins to think that certainly she’ll begin to blur at the edges soon.
If it is a dream, though, it is a dream he has never had before.
How many times has he prayed for it? Just a glimpse of her, that was all he needed.
Do ghosts have heartbeats?
He can feel her pulse in her skin. How it jumps up to greet him when he skims his tired, wretched mouth along the fine slope of her shoulder. What a blessed thing it is.
He remembers, quite fondly, the countless hours he had spent committing that heartbeat to memory. Focused so hard on it that his own pulse rearranged itself to keep time.
It occurs to him – on the back of a half-formed thought – that maybe he’s a ghost, too. And perhaps this is some kind of purgatory where he must make amends. This is where he repents. This is where he kisses her fiercely and carves the apologies out of his chest.
It pains him too greatly to dwell too long on their children and how they raised them and how he was absent for most of their lives. Chasing something he’d never catch and didn’t have a name for. What was it that had spurred him into motion all his life? Why wouldn’t it let him just stand still?
He drags in a shuddering breath and the smile dims at its edges and he presses closed his eyes. He swallows thickly and tries hard to steady his swimming head. He had never been a great father. And nobody who ever held him should have considered themselves lucky.
“I was no good to you, Plumeria,” he says and the words are barbed and they cut his throat and they throb in the air between them. “I was never any good to you.” Never any good to or for anyone, he thinks but doesn’t say. Just lays his cheek wearily against her shoulder again. “If there was ever anything in this world I didn't deserve, it was you.” The words hurt so terribly to say out loud that the effort furrows his brow but his voice does not waver.
“There are so many things I would do differently,” he murmurs. Were their fleeting glimpses at happiness worth all the pain that separated them? If he could go back and change things, would he have spared her?
son of caden & fray
once-king of the hidden tundra