Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave--/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross
If there is one thing that has never been in his nature, it is rage. It does not come easily to Orestes; or at least, it never has. Perhaps she is unworthy, if she would abandon her people. He wants to say you’re right. He wants to use the words to take up a new mantle, furious and—
Perhaps he will. Orestes clenches his teeth but it is not her, no, it is not her, it is the fact when she presses into him and he drops his head to offer an embrace, he knows he has done this same thing before, at a different time. Orestes knows they have been here before, simply not here.
Orestes’s eyes follow the seaweed being tugged by the surf, being held by her hoof. She releases it and he finds the act painfully merciful considering their line of conversation. She demands, tell me your name and Orestes’s mouth feels full of salt, full of cotton, full of things that would make it impossible to speak. She is staring into his face and he is staring into hers and he knows but doesn’t know, he remembers but cannot remember and at last, heavily, he says, “Orestes.”
And in saying it, it has never sounded feeble. So not enough. A man’s name, that’s all. The name of a man.
He was meant to be more.
Orestes knows it.
And he knows he never became it;
and that is why he can remember the press of her body and how it fit when he embraced her, but he cannot remember why he knows.
