|
He hadn’t followed you from bedlam, hadn’t followed through the dead meadow dusted with white (her tomb), the mountains, to the valley nestled underneath it all, hadn’t followed you home. He hadn’t followed, and something inside of you aches terribly at the thought that you had lost him in your denial, in his anger for the hundreth time. There had been no waited sense of relief as you made your way slowly to the top of the incline, past memories of devilry, as the narrow pass opened to the snow-laden Basin, only a hopelessness that reached deep inside of your weary, worn soul.
Even now, as you walk the same paths, distinct in their familiarity despite the snow, despite the cold, despite the heaviness in your legs, your mind, your heart, there is no comfort. Even the lake in its constant stillness seems to shift, to change into something colder, as you look out at it, slivers of you hoping for the untouchable silhouette of a dumb boy with more courage than sense and his little fox, knowing that they won’t be there, knowing that it is because of you that they aren’t.
You turn away, winding past the panes of glass erected for the greenhouse, a reminder of your failures within the months of self-indulgence, and you only sink deeper into yourself, too tired, too defeated to truly care in this moment.
It is the sight of steam in the near distance that pushes a sigh from you, your sore, numbing body tingling with a dull anticipation for something other than the biting wind and chill or the hard stone waiting for you in your little cavern nestled within the trees. Unceremoniously you fall into the blistering warmth, ignoring the screaming of your skin in the face of the sudden change in temperature, ignore the stinging of your bruises, the open wounds along your mangled sides.
Only now, with your weight suspended within the water, too weak to hold in a sorrow you didn’t know you’d been clutching to, do you begin to sob quietly into the calm solitude of the winter that surrounds you.
|
.svg/2000px-Google_Chrome_icon_(2011).svg.png){kind=icon}
