“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”
Perhaps it is wrong, to say too much.
Perhaps there is some deep-set and subtle sin in opening yourself, in ripping your seems and letting out all the moths. Catharsis is not the justification Michael believes in when he opens his mouth and pours himself into everyone else's empty spaces as if he is not also just a house of rooms that echo each word he says until he is dizzy from hearing it.
Michael does not say this--as Michael does not say most things, whether they should be left unsaid or not. Instead he watches her, blue on baby blue, as she turns from him to the sea, gray-green and rolling in the heavy winter light.
Something settles in him that he doesn't like, something like the remnants of a nightmare, the way it sits in the gut for hours after waking. Michael does not know what it is, just that it rises in his chest like the sun when she mentions her family.
What he doesn't realize is that it is a kind of mourning - and a thing that's lived for centuries can be forgiven for forgetting how to love a thing that can die in any way that touches him - but the ferocity with which it hits him makes it hard to breathe.
"That must be hard," he says, swallowing around the rock in his throat. Grief fills him and then passes through and out of him as if it were never there at all. He thanks the sea, silently. He thanks Elena, silently, when she changes the subject.
You look cold, she says, and Michael gives her this smile that is so much warmer than he has ever felt, just a gentle tucking in of the corner of his mouth. It looks out of place around the tangled, dripping mess of his mane. "Don't worry, I am very cold." He says. "I'm just--"
Michael pauses, and his smile outlives itself, rotting as it shines.
Why is he here?
Because he is afraid? Because he has never been so afraid or so lost in his hundreds of years of life? Because he is full of some indefinite, cringing sadness that he cannot place or name or even necessarily see, but it is so heavy that it is always right there where he feels it the most? Because he cannot quite see who he is through the fog?
There are many reasons.
What are you doing out here? he echoes back to himself. Michael looks out at the waves and he thinks, drowning.
"Just visiting," he decides, "haven't been in a while. My name is Michael."
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