i used to pray like god was listening
i used to make my parents proud
i used to make my parents proud
She looks at you, in the way many people do. For a moment you feel bitter, a bile that rises in your throat and sits behind your teeth. You hate when people look at you like that, with the raised brow, a question that demands the answer. You don't know the answer. You've never known it. Just another one of those things that slips through your fingers even as you stretch your hands toward it because you're-- what? Depressed? Burnt-out? Something altogether else that cuts as sharp as one of your perfectly balanced blades?
You swim through the fog of sleep and bitterness toward the surface, ears ringing with the weight of it. If your smile is mirthless it is surprisingly well-hidden except for a quiet strain tucked into the corners, where no one can see and especially in the shadow cast by the glow of the coals as it hits your back.
In your dreams, Arkwright, she says, and it feels simpler now. Marisol never asks much from you except what you're good at, and that is creation. Rickard said you were an artist, like he never quite was. Rickard said you loved it in a way that few people can, like you breath molten steel and your body is sustained by making and doing. He had just never told you what to do when the fire runs low and your bellows huff fruitlessly in your chest.
But it is still simpler, and all the bitterness drains out of your face as she speaks. It is still sitting in your heart, like an animal, but it is a quiet and sleeping one.
You will use it, later. Fold it into steel and iron. Make it into something beautiful and simple and almost holy. As you do everything.
"Who's 'awake,'" you joke, "I've never met her." The table is a mess of scraps and tools and malformed ingots laid over the plain, rough Oak top. You look from her, to it, back to her (that question again, that offends you for reasons you can't quite place-- because it's warranted? Because it hurts in some nameless way to be seen not working? Because you should be working but you're gripped by a fear that says what if it's not enough? so many times that you hear it when your hammer strikes?) Without saying anything, without dropping your smile, you start to put things in their places, pulling out drawers and dropping rivets into them, hanging your tools beneath their respective shelves.
It seems easier than anything else. It is easier than anything else. "Anyway, you're glad you caught me awake?" you say, stacking templates in a way that feels pristine and neat but really isn't, to the outside eye. There is some big black hole in you, yawning. It, not you, is what turns back to her and waits.
You swim through the fog of sleep and bitterness toward the surface, ears ringing with the weight of it. If your smile is mirthless it is surprisingly well-hidden except for a quiet strain tucked into the corners, where no one can see and especially in the shadow cast by the glow of the coals as it hits your back.
In your dreams, Arkwright, she says, and it feels simpler now. Marisol never asks much from you except what you're good at, and that is creation. Rickard said you were an artist, like he never quite was. Rickard said you loved it in a way that few people can, like you breath molten steel and your body is sustained by making and doing. He had just never told you what to do when the fire runs low and your bellows huff fruitlessly in your chest.
But it is still simpler, and all the bitterness drains out of your face as she speaks. It is still sitting in your heart, like an animal, but it is a quiet and sleeping one.
You will use it, later. Fold it into steel and iron. Make it into something beautiful and simple and almost holy. As you do everything.
"Who's 'awake,'" you joke, "I've never met her." The table is a mess of scraps and tools and malformed ingots laid over the plain, rough Oak top. You look from her, to it, back to her (that question again, that offends you for reasons you can't quite place-- because it's warranted? Because it hurts in some nameless way to be seen not working? Because you should be working but you're gripped by a fear that says what if it's not enough? so many times that you hear it when your hammer strikes?) Without saying anything, without dropping your smile, you start to put things in their places, pulling out drawers and dropping rivets into them, hanging your tools beneath their respective shelves.
It seems easier than anything else. It is easier than anything else. "Anyway, you're glad you caught me awake?" you say, stacking templates in a way that feels pristine and neat but really isn't, to the outside eye. There is some big black hole in you, yawning. It, not you, is what turns back to her and waits.
Hugo Arkwright
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