Leaving

He steps back into her world, feeling the ancient dust rise and fall about his soles. The old scent retreats weakly to the wall where the graying paint is flecked with something other than a mistake. Its traces, too, were instantly gone in an urgency more alive than themselves. His hello was familiar when he murmurs it, even when the letters that form it are barely apart.

Her response shatters the silence. Not so much because its curtness is another beginning as it is really just a finality. In a moment, she is padding back to her corner where she can watch him and not change. Maybe there, the last chain that links them together can hold. The silence returns, but not to his head.

As he sighs, he draws unto him the knowledge he fears. She is worse than gone, worse than if she screamed back then and tossed him back to the shores. She accepts him, but her acceptance is without thought. She sees him, but only sees him as one of the scars she's long done nursing.

Oh, the years. When he thinks about what he remembers he thinks about the laps she was willing to run with him. In those days it was so much easier to look back, because looking back meant seeing her rope her way around the field. Even if she'd lulled herself far away into the oval, there was ever that one last breath they'd share together once the day was over. In hindsight, the last of that might have been in one of those distant runs.

He can watch her too if he chooses. Perhaps if he looks long enough she'll throw a glance his way and show him a flicker of the old recognition. Then of course, she'll merge back inside her force field, thickened by the passage of years, just as her mind abandons all that she can think of about him. Who knows in what name she prays for him now.