and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try
now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
It’s as if nothing at all has changed.
It’s as if her barrel is not swollen with a child that does not belong to him.
But it does not pain him to think it because she does not belong to him either. He would never try to convince her – or himself – otherwise. She kisses his cheek so sweetly that it’s as if she has not been gone at all. As if only moments have passed since the last time he bathed himself in her warmth and in the warmth that lives inside him when she is near. A warmth born from love, selfless and unflinching.
She tells him that she’s missed him and he feels some distant pang in his chest. Buried beneath so much glass, the heart spasms. He’d missed her, as well. The girls had missed her, too. But he hesitates to tell her as much for fear that it might elicit any amount of guilt.
“We missed you, too,” he murmurs and presses his glass mouth into the warmth of her chest. He tells her because he cannot bear the thought of her thinking they had not noticed she’d been gone at all. It is difficult to find balance between ensuring she knows that there is an emptiness in the world when she is gone and ensuring she knows that he does not fault her for it.
And perhaps he is too soft in his love. Perhaps that is why she cannot stay.
She presses that swollen barrel into his side but he cannot bring himself to resent it. But he does not ask her about it either. She does not belong to him. Her decisions are her own and he will not let himself be wounded by them.
He lifts his head and casts a glance around the meadow, as if their daughters are lurking somewhere in the shade of some great tree. But they are nowhere to be seen, the two of them. Still, he smiles at the mention of them. How tirelessly he has worried about them, the same way he’d worried about his own brittle build so many years ago. Their girls, such a delicate balance of the two of them.
“They’re beautiful,” he says, “and good and kind.” His smile deepens when he turns his gaze back to her and gingerly nudges her neck. “They’re perfect, like their mother.”
THOMAS
— and you don't care for me enough to cry —