sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago.
There is a memory that stirs someplace in the furthest recesses of his psyche.
He can feel it curl at its edges sometimes.
He can almost catch it in his teeth before it’s gone again.
Perhaps this is why he is so quick to agitate, because there is something that is always flitting just outside of his reach. Sometimes he think there must be a reason for it. A reason that, try as he might, he can never force the memory to the front of his mind, can never force it to take shape. Sometimes he grits his teeth and tries until the muscles tremble and his jaw aches and his chest heaves with all of the effort he pours into trying to remember.
Sometimes he does not dwell on it for months. In those months, he forgets it exists at all. His frustration lays coiled in the pit of his gut, dormant. Until he feels it stirring again.
He feels it now. He stands, poised on the edge of something, a vise tightened around his throat. He closes his eyes, as if this might help, funnels all of his effort into trying to drag it to the forefront. His bones ache with want. He sucks in a sharp breath, stubbornly ignoring the ache in his jaw and his joints. There is a sound that begins at the center of him, the very pit of his gut, gathers force and momentum as it claws its way up the long, parched column of his throat, culminates in some great, animal thing as it explodes out of his mouth and echoes in the trees around him.
Because, still, it remains just out of reach.
Foolish, he knows, to think there is any part of his unremarkable life worth remembering at all.
He opens his eyes then, casts a cursory glance into the shadows that slant toward him, and realizes with a start that he is not alone.
