But it was there.
As sure as the sun is in the sky, as sure as the grass will still be green tomorrow, it was there.
His face is composed now, staring at me with a sort of haughtiness, like he is above it all. "Why should this concern me?" he asks, one eyebrow arched like a wave at its height before it crashes and falls to the shore, enveloping your feet. I stare at him, not sure what to say. I could reach out to him, try to coax him, pretending to believe his façade; that my words have no impression on him whatsoever.
But I saw it on his face.
He didn't want me to...
but I did.
He is thrown off by my silence, and another flicker passes over his rough, dark eyes, which so wish to be mysterious and brooding but cannot hide their secrets anymore than the stars can turn off their lights and disappear from the night sky. "None of what you've told me," he says, trying to build back his poker face rather unsuccessfully, "has anything to with me. I'm not sure why you told me at all." And then he laughs, a short, nonchalant thing, but in the laugh for the shortest fraction of a second his voice breaks, and I hear what the laugh is really doing: disguising the tears. Finally, I open my mouth; to be merciful, if nothing else. I can no longer watch this without feeling cruel and sadistic. "I'm sorry," I say to him. His face goes completely blank, only now the blankness is not to hide the flicker of emotion which shown as a lightbulb shines before you flip the switch. Now the blankness is a confusion, a lostness, a desperate cry of, "Everything is gone– what shall I do now?" I feel cruel once again, but there is nothing more I can do for him, and I know that the sooner I am gone, the sooner he can build himself up again. So I turn from him, and even as his arm reaches out to take hold of mine, I do not turn, but stride forward, with a vow as strong as the oath the earth makes that it will continue spinning that I will never look back.
© 2011
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