The whole world fell apart.

You left, and I never came back. I knew everything, and that was too much. It was too much Manhattan, it was... it was... just too much.

I watched father and I followed him and he fell and I watched and he cried and I watched and he begged and I tugged and I pulled and chains snapped and he fell and he cried and I watched and you died, Manhattan. Right before my eyes, you died.

I knew, too, that you weren't coming back. You whined like a child and your eyes blurred into nothing because mine were filled with tears and wet. There was nothing like watching you die to teach me about love and mortality and my very small place in this infinite world.

I felt useless. I knew everything and I felt as if I meant nothing. How could I, if you had died saving my and father's lives? Protecting us, at least. Caught under a deadly claw and dragged to the earth.

I can't decide, not even now, if you put up all resistance or if you chose to die. I want to think you tried to stay alive, but I don't think that's true. I think you looked at father and you looked at the end of your life and you realized you'd done him all you could--that staying alive would only hurt him.

You were teaching him a lesson, I know that. You were teaching him about what you could and couldn't take for granted, but...

...but what about me, Manhattan?

Why? Why couldn't you have stayed for me? Do you remember how you taught me all the few things that I knew and I thought that you'd been given to father by mistake? That you should have been made for me, and some accident had happened that put you on earth too early? Don't you remember it? Don't you have to?

I can't forget it. I can't forget it. So how could you? How could you leave like that, when I was just finding out what love was, and thrust it on me with your final breath so I could feel its pain completely?

Father shook and cried and I understood his pain and his emotion and his need to speak, to cry out your name. But that was the day I learned everything. My mind filled itself out completely and I knew everything I would ever need was in my head, and that to speak would only be to form bonds like the one my father was dying for.

I made a vow to keep silent. After only speaking a handful of words, before I could even say my own name, I gave up on speech. Things would be easier, that way. For everyone. I held the bridle in my mouth and watched silently. Barely shaking, shutting soft lids to dampen tears, and letting my father and uncle openly mourn a tragedy I fought with silently inside.

No, there were no words for this sort of sadness at all. Just thoughts, and knowing, and pain.

""