01-15-2017, 08:51 PM
Love, sighs the heart.
Never lasts, mutters the brain.
It is cold, like the heart inside him that throbs slow and dull in the dead of winter.
Each snowflake that kisses his fur, is like a memory of nothingness that he turns his broad, bleak face up to. He can feel them resonate in his bones, down into the very marrow of him until it is shaken, frozen, fixed in ways that cannot be undone like the winter will be by the first warm touches of a spring he plans to look away from. It is spring that hurts him the most, because she came to him in spring with her salmon-pink hair and by summer’s end, she had his heart and all of him.
Gone, the brain shrieks.
Gone, the heart echoes sadly.
Gone, he thinks.
Summer and she, both.
Gone, gone, gone.
He sucks in a sharp breath; it burns, like only cold air can but he savors the burn - it tells him something still works, still knows what feels right and what doesn’t. Mandan has trouble recognizing that himself, or maybe it’s just the feelings that he fails to recognize let alone think still exist in him, a tiny seed squirreled away until the time is right. (Always that! - rightness, of moments and beings, like love and dreams, always that and yet it can never be - never again, the flash of eyes in that face beneath that unusual shock of hair and the ever-present smell of flowers that makes him sick to this day!)
His gaze jumps from the snowy backs of bushes to the snowy backs of horses that move through the snow. He does not envy them the fact that they have somewhere to go; he prefers it this way, no fetters of home and herd. Not since the Reckoning took it all away, and his horns too, he feels so naked without them! To the point that he cannot even look at his shadow and see it as part of him, it’s just a dark shape on the ground that mocks him - dark and creeping, like he feels he should be but something keeps him from crossing that divide to become more than he is, miserable, piteous, a thing meant for ending. (Beginnings are like stories, he has none.) Even his shadow, unrecognizable as his, suggests that maybe he is lonely but he scoffs at this suggestion and stamps his big feet in the snow.
Lonely, cries the heart.
Never, shouts the brain.
He settles, his brief seethe is over, and the snow claims his back once more until he too, is pale and poorly dressed to receive company.
(The sneer on his face ought to keep even the bravest of them at bay.)