“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.”
There are always people, asking him--begging him--to stay or to go.
Eleven asks him to stay. Asks him to flay himself open and show her all the parts of him that hurt, each raw and aching wound. She asks him to stay even when she does not. She asks and she asks and she asks until Michael is sand, falling in wet clumps out of her hand, breaks apart as he plummets.
Inwe asks him to leave, because he had had tried to be a good king instead of a good father and in the end he was neither, with nothing to show for it - so here he is, king of nothing. Father of no one. Another name washed away by the surf.
Isra asks him to stay, and he can't. Isra asks him to stay with her heart black as a burned out tree and a hungry god inside of her--or she is the hungry god, but he can't tell. Isra asks him to stay and Michael's heart fills with helium, beats faster and faster until it is a pair of wings carrying him away. He is so tired of running but he runs and he runs and he runs.
Isra then asks him to leave, with her, with her family, to do-- something. And Michael says yes, yes, anything for you, yes, because he could never say no. Not again. Not after the last time. And he is so tired of running.
“They say a serpent tricked Eve into biting the apple and in doing so doomed us all," Elena says, "and that is why we fear them," Elena says. For a second Michael just stares at her, trying to find something to say. He does not know how to say that he fears anything that hides so it can't be seen. He does not know how to say that the snake is not there until it is rattling and flashing its fangs. He does not know how to tell her that his life has been snake after snake, curled up in the sun, waiting and waiting until he gets too close.
at he doesn't look, and that's why he gets bitten. He doesn't want to look. He'd never want to look.
Michael follows her eyes back out to the sea, tracking a wave as it crests and then rolls in to meet them. It grabs at his ankles and the wet sheet of his smane and says tell her but he either can't, or won't, so he doesn't.
"I think it's a lot to ask, to belong anywhere." he begins, watching a crab scurry out of the surf to bury itself under a rock. "I think some places want you, and some don't, but I don't know that a person ever belongs." Michael wonders when he became so cynical. Michael wonders many things about him self and none of them are good.
Would you go?
Elena asks him to go, asks him where, asks him eh, and Michael thinks of the journey ahead with a heart heavy enough to think their ship. He thinks of the sea, and the sky, and gulls keening into the setting sun.
He thinks of Elena, and her eyes that beg, and her heart so big and so wide it could swallow him whole.
"Yes." he says. "But not alone."
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