‘You should find him again.’

“I’ve tried—“ It is an admission of defeat, breathed out in a whisper filled with your frustrations, your worries and doubts that have hounded you from the moment he had vanished. There is hurt, too, buried somewhere out of reach, beneath the things that climb to the surface with ease, hurt in the face of the suggestion that it is simply that easy, that you just have not been trying (hard enough), and if you only looked, he would come back to you.

But he hasn’t.

There is an unspoken, untouched part of you that dreads all that that could mean, of the things that could have gone so very wrong for a child, of all the times you have looked and found nothing, nothing to ground you to the knowledge that he hasn't just disappeared entirely, that at least he is still breathing. Your spine trembles, heart quaking with the fear that any mother would be right for having, one that you have tried to deny over the months, the changing of seasons since he had gone. It would consume you, bury you beneath the crumbling pieces of your world, deep enough so that you would never find the will to rise again.

Denied it, because there is an even bigger part of you that knows he is alive, believes that you would have felt something different by now, a resonation within your bones, your soul, if he was not.

“I haven’t stopped trying.” The words come suddenly as you shake from yourself, look to the lake instead of him so that he may not see the (undeserved) accusations, the dull hurt, that lay just underneath. Even when your body had been broken, bruised, when it had been an agony to walk and your heart had been filled with the fear of being alone, heavy to the point of bursting with failures and worry, you hadn’t stopped. Even now, through feverish dreams, the feeling that he does not want to be found, you have not stopped. It simply isn't within you. Your shoulders shrug slowly, brows folding together as you look at him, forcing yourself to smile instead of crying. “The more I have the more lost he's felt to me, as if I've somehow only pushed him further away by trying,” you pause as the words become shards in your chest, piercing, reminding you of how he had always been, distant in the attempts of your closeness. “But how can I not?”

It isn’t something that is meant to be answered.

There is a soft whine at your feet and you shift, instantly beginning to tuck away the turmoil that your son’s absence brings, allowing yourself to instead meld with the comparative calm that he offers you, apologies thick in your mind. He sighs, placing his head on large paws, watching the three in front of him with mild interest. It is different, the intimate influence of another, how easy it had been to let go, knowing that it helped nothing, to have another outlet besides your own turbulence.

‘How does it feel?’ He asks, and there is a surprised bark of laughter in response, entangled, overwhelmed in the foreign feeling of the newness of it all, of the constant noise where there has been stillness in every forgotten piece of you. And you move against it, push closer to the absoluteness of it; finally smiling down at the pup nestled now quiet, still, at your feet. “As if I’ve only been asleep all this time.” Between the lines of his laugh, of the same smile you’ve seen a thousand times despite everything, you know it isn’t what the boy expected.

A breath of a laugh comes then to undermine your moment of sincerity, a singular moment of vulnerability (though what is once more, when he has known the deepest parts of you?), as your eyes trail to each of them in turn, your smile only growing until a desperate hunger begins to bleed through your being. Your head lifts to blink stupidly at the boy, as if you do not know what comes next, as if the dietary needs of a predator are lost on you. The how is what you do not, cannot, come to terms with on your own, and it churns your stomach to think of, suddenly aware amidst the echoing of his soul, the new, beautiful consciousness that presses closely to yours, the moments where it had all become one. “He’s hungry.”