i worshiped at the altar of losing everything
How strange that a dead thing should feel such a vicious ache.
It had taken up residence in a valley between his ribs sometime in the night.
If he still breathed perhaps it would have arrested the air in his chest, hitched it in his throat.
Alas, he did not breathe and the pain itself was a phantom. Because dead things cannot feel pain. At least not the physical kind.
(How fiercely he has felt emotional pain, the only kind of pain that has ever taken him to his knees.)
He does not know why he took to walking. Except that, perhaps, he had thought to blame the pain on geography. Something in all that red clay in Pangea. But walk he did, through the night and most of the day. Without telling anyone where he was headed (for how do you tell someone where you’re going when you don’t know yourself?), he had merely set off toward the horizon.
There is some comfort in it, he thinks, in knowing that he can still carry himself across vast distances. It is easier, too, without having to stop for food or for water or to rest tired muscles. Because he feels neither hunger nor thirst and, though he has not slept in weeks, he certainly does not feel exhaustion.
His traveling takes him to the river. He could cross it, he thinks, test the limits of his new, undead body. Would he drown? Could he drown? Or would he merely be swept out to sea, where he would spend the rest of his days fighting the current, trying to reach shore? He feels a heaviness today and the ache in his ribcage prevents him from casting himself into the water. So, he merely turns and follows the river to the sea.
By the time he makes it there, the sun has sunk heavy and low toward the horizon. He gives pause there and longs to drag in a shuddering breath, just as he had every time he’d caught the sun suspended just above the earth in all the years he’d spent alive. But there is no breath, so he merely watches a moment before moving steadily onward.
But there is something that arrests his attention and he wonders, quite briefly, how he’d failed to notice her. His gaze falls heavy on her frame, the outstretched wings, and it occurs to him that he’d caught her on the verge of something. He blinks, takes one short step backward.
“Ah,” he says, subdued, “I’m sorry if I startled you.”
and i still chase you into heartache every time you take a step
@[Oceane]