i worshiped at the altar of losing everything
How it pains him to think that she might be happy to see him.
But there is an unmistakable glint in her eye and a kind of dance in her step as she moves to help remove all of the negative space between them.
He cannot remember the last time someone had been happy to see him.
(That’s not true, he can remember it quite well – his mother’s smile, her palpable relief, the way her expression had collapsed around his grief and then her own).
He does not know why guilt pools in his throat. Perhaps because he knows that her happiness, too, will end in disappointment. There is no reason to be happy to see him. There never has been.
Because his mother had been happy to see him and he’d broken her heart.
Because Keiran had been happy to see him and then.
And then.
But he conjures up a smile – subdued, tired – and he dips his head in greeting. Tries to hide his eyes. The dull, dead eyes. Cold and flat. Eyes that had been alive the last time he’d seen her. Glimmering with a spark of hope, the knowledge that their loved ones were waiting for them on the other side of that rift on the beach.
She reaches out to touch him and he does not move out of the way quick enough. Doesn’t even try, really. Just lets her touch his cold shoulder. It is only then that he lifts his gaze from the earth to her face, just in time to recognize the flicker of uncertainty in her gaze.
It is a simple enough question, certainly. The pair of them. What happened? They both came back changed, he thinks, just in vastly different ways. Is he okay? No, certainly not, but it is difficult to say how much of that has to do with being a dead thing.
“I’m okay,” he says, lies. “I guess this is the price of forgiveness,” he muses and then smiles again. Tries to. Rolls a shoulder in a kind of shrug. As if this is merely a foolish mistake, something to be bashful about, embarrassed by. He might have coughed out a laugh if there had been any breath in his lungs.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asks then, the brow softening in question.
and i still chase you into heartache every time you take a step