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‘I know much more than you think, so tell me, are you truly okay?’ You can swear that you had never met someone so insistent, so utterly infuriating, and yet, even as your blood begins to boil, you hold your tongue. It is only silence, silence and a slightly incredulous look that the man gets in return to his questions. You do not see why it should matter to him, do not see what significance your well-being holds, and so you do not see the point in answering him for what feels like the hundredth time. But even as you draw this conclusion something shifts, changes entirely and yet everything seems exactly the same. You look to him from under those long lashes, eyes narrowing ever so slightly as he pries once more.
"What force?" You blink slowly, eyebrows furrowing together as you simply stare some more, caught in-between anger and all the hurt you had tried to bury and trying desperately to forget the latter. You want to be angry with him, want to cut him and make him bleed the way that he has done to you, to leave so you can fall apart on your own terms, away from this strange man and his stranger’s eyes. But you don’t. You don’t run, instead breathing in a shaky breath. “Nivos,” You shudder then, subtle as an earthquake, your face contorting with the veiled pain that his name brings, the faces stapled to the back of your eyelids as visible as ever. “My own monumental fuck ups.” It is a laugh that comes instead of tears, soft and naked, full of a sorrow you could never even hope to put to words.
"I didn't even have the strength to bury him, the courage to find our parents---" it bleeds from you then, thick and choking, tearless sobs racking your body violently though your heart weeps and weeps, weeps like it has since the day that you lost them. "That I ran, when I should have stayed; ran and yet those eyes have followed me," It is all you can do to hold yourself together, your knees wobbly beneath your weight, face turned from the darkness of his, away from those eyes that burrow through you like a thousand suns. You do not want to be seen, the tears suddenly pouring down your cheeks admittance of all your stacking failures. "That it was my brother that died, and not me. He would have been able to actually do something." Softer this time, nothing more than a whisper, quivering feebly against the darkening shades of dusk. “But it was him. Him, and all I could do was cry.”
He speaks, and you do your best to listen, lips merely trembling where they should have smiled, a defiance sparking in the depths of your ocean blues, earthen browns. “I’m glad.” And somewhere, you truly are to have helped him, that you could erase his hurts even if it is only superficial, somewhere within the gaping hole that you had been trying so hard to keep pulled together. Even as he gives his name, jumps through the hoops of formality it is all you manage. He had stolen secrets you never meant to tell, and suddenly it is hard to even look at him. Your eyes flutter to the sand, heavy and burning, no different from the rest of you.
It is only now that you are too tired to fight it, too selfish to regard his feelings on the matter, that you give to your instinct to run, too afraid of his judgments and assumptions, turning on tiny heels as you try to bolt away from him, managing only a few strides before your weary body gives way. It is in a heap that you fall, and there that you stay, suddenly feeling old, too old – brittle and weak and all too tired (defeated) all at once. Too tired to fight, too tired to remember, too tired to care You lay your head down against the sand, warm compared to the feeling crawling over your skin, returning to the pathetic sobs that you managed to suppress for only moments. You have forgotten about the sand-and-sky man, forgotten everything but the consuming ache within your chest.
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like punching in a dream, breathing life into a nightmare
