Solitude

“Your friends… What kind of people are they? Do they think of you as a friend?”

It burned in my head like molten lead.

“Do they think of you as a friend?”

It burned in my head like molten lead.

The words did not belong to a monster, or a king, or a god. They belonged to a child standing in the endless, sunlit grass of the field, their face hidden behind a mask that completely emptied them of humanity. I couldn’t answer them.

I looked down at my hands. They were the hands of a protector, thick-skinned and scarred, built to hold things together, to be the link between what was and what was to come. But everything I touch eventually carries the heat of that lead.

Across the pasture, under the shade of the solitary tree, I could see them. My children. They walked with that same heavy, hesitant step that I do—a stride carved out by a lifetime of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I had wanted to build a fortress for them out of my own survival. Instead, I had only built a blueprint of my own wreckage, handing them the tools to dig their own trenches.

I took one step toward the tree, just one, wanting to call out, to tell them I was sorry for the poison in the well. But the grass beneath my feet seemed to stretch, the horizon yawning wide and hollow between us. The closer I tried to get, the further the earth pushed them away, a silent, natural law of this place reminding me of the architecture of my life: near enough to watch them bleed, but too far to ever staunch the wound.

“Do they think of you as a friend?”

It burned in my head like molten lead.