“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.”
Dawn creeps in, and then out, smoothing the day over the dry grass of the prairie with a slow but deliberate fervor. The sun is bright, a grinning sphere framed by columns of thick, white cloud.
Michael sleeps late, too--rises only as the sun peaks, when his neck aches from the heat and his eyelids feel heavy and dry--but it is not for any good reason. Perhaps this has always been the difference between Pan and Michael, even the Michael-that-used-to-be with his bright smiles and a heart that does not just dump blood into the void: that Pan lifts his head from the grass with the satisfaction of a cat with a bowl of cream, and Michael rolls first to his knees then his feet and feels somehow more tired than when he began.
He wonders if he will ever be anything but tired. He wonders what people do, when they are not creaking old ships and the spears of bleached whale bones, half-buried by sand and seaweed and panicked crabs.
This is how Michael walks from the city to the mountain on an endless loop, praying to gods that don't exist for things he doesn't want--as if he is seconds from giving out altogether, laying down in the long, yellow grass and just closing his eyes until at last the earth burns down to nothing beneath him. When he finds Pan, first just legs visible over the shallow slope of the field, Michael is almost not happy to see him. It seems so much easier, especially today, to just turn and go.
To close his eyes like he wants to.
To take a deep breath and resolve to be a better man on a better day.
But before he can decide, Pan's eyes are open, he's smiling and stretching and blinking the sun out of his eyes and Michael knows, it is too late. Perhaps it is always too late. Perhaps he wants it to be.
"Midday, or something like it." Michael answers. He does not say that the part of him that wants to run is shrinking. He does not say that the sun is so bright and so warm that it glances off she shields of Pan's scales and makes Michael squint. He does not say that there is cool relief filling him, a sort of calmness that he's not accustomed to, the sort of comfort that comes only from being the least interesting man in the room--no responsibility to be anything or anyone of consequence.
He likes it.
It should be his default state, because there is truly no thing less consequential than Michael is, but he has never quite captured it until now.
Did you come from the party? Pan asks as Michael takes the pastry he's offered, turning it over in his grip before taking a bite. (It is sweeter than he expects, but so are most things.) At first Michael wonders what party? Has he truly been so wrapped up in his life that he missed the string lights, the soft flower tea, the drinking, the laughing, the dancing to fiddles and flutes a chorus of song?
(The answer is yes, this is exactly what happened - because Michael has been thinking too much, about Moira, and monsters, and gods with hearts that beat like war drums.)
"There's a party?" he asks, smiling. "So then you've come from it, for sure, right?"
Michael takes another bite of the pastry, chews thoughtfully, and swallows, staring at Pan the whole time. "Did you have fun?"
@pan
