T
here are many emotions Boudika should be feeling. Anger. Hatred. Betrayal. Awkwardness. Hurt. `
Yes. Boudika thinks she should feel anger, most of all. The pain is fresh in her mind; that, at least, has not faded. She remembers the wrath his betrayal evoked; she remembers how the rage settled in her belly like iron. Suddenly, it was impossible for her to eat, to sleep, to drink. Boudika remembers flying until she forgot her own name; she remembers the hoarseness of the osprey’s cry, and the way that when she at last became a woman, her voice had been rough from misuse. These memories are sharp and jagged as glass; they are raw as fresh wounds. She cannot escape the way they make her mouth taste like salt water.
(Not from the sea, but from her tears).
And yet, inexplicably—he is as beautiful as she remembers, standing there next to the thing she loves most. The posture of his body reminds her of a tumultuous sea, despite his stillness. Even the ocean before him is calm. Even the sea. The tumult, the chaos, resides within them. It is electric in the air.
(This is the moment Boudika wishes her heart did not soften around the sight of him. This is the moment she tries, with desperate fierceness, to hate him).
The wind teases his hair. The sea-borne gusts billow it out in long, tossed strands. He starts when she speaks. She stands apart, the distance between so physically large—but somehow, still insurmountable. Tenebrae breathes out her name, as he always has.
(Between them stretches the voids love digs; the pits it carves; the way it fills and then, in absence, leaves such cavernous recessions. She cannot close the distance. She cannot forget the elation in her heart, crippled. This is when she nearly turns away; when her heart reaches her throat; when she knows the distance between them is the worst kind, the distance made greater by a closeness once shared).
He does not turn to regard her. In some ways, that is a blessing. Mostly, it makes her teeth ache. Boudika knows, when he does not look at her, that something irrevocable has changed.
(It would be so much easier to hate him).
Boudika fears the moment she will see his face, and so she lives a little longer in this fear. She can pretend, if she does not see it, that nothing has changed; but the pretense is as much torture as the actuality. Her imagination takes flight. You do not deserve to look at me. She knows what she will find when he turns, at last, to glance at her.
(I hate him, she thinks, as her heart swells with painful affection, with sharper regret, with a compassion she does not want to feel).
“Do you remember the island?” Boudika asks. Her voice is a girl’s voice, a voice that says, once upon a time… “The last thing you had said, before I had left you, was: ‘I won’t hurt you.’ You were speaking of me; confident that I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, hurt you. I think I might have laughed—”
(She does not laugh now).
She is breaking. She is breaking as the sea does upon the rocks of a cliff-face—again, and again, and again. But what wears away more, what wears away first? The cliffs, or the relentless water? She closes her eyes, because the anticipation is killing her. Would it be worse if he retained his sight? Would it be more gruesome if the eyes were pitted? Slashed over? Tightly bound? Boudika has never been a coward. And she cannot be a coward now. She exhales and then, with gentleness that is surprising, she steps forward. She pauses. And then she steps forward again, and again.
Her legs carry her until she is beside him, and then beyond. Once knee-deep in the water, she turns to regard him.
When Boudika’s crimson eyes meet his bright, unseeing ones, she does not cringe. She does not exhale sharply. She does nothing but rest a moment more in silence.
(This is when: she wants to hate him. The pain already blooming in her heart would be tolerable--unnoticeable, even--if she hated him. The sentiment would act like unconsciousness after an amputation; an act of mercy. I hate him, she thinks, again).
But how can she?
The woman who has learned to love her most hated enemies, who forgave the cruelest of betrayals, who loved an unlovable father, who gave everything to an undeserving nation?
It is not in her nature.
And Boudika can be nothing but herself.
“Tenebrae.” Her voice is barely audible. “I would like it if we could stop hurting one another, now.”
So tell me how to be in this world
Tell me how to breathe in and feel no hurt
