Bound Mortals Do Not Go Home

One night, my dove. You can spare me that mercy, can’t you?

You are to leave in the morning, back to the little mortal life I could never give you. And so tonight, for the last time, I stand across this great chasm that has grown between us and remain exactly the man you believe me to be.

Careless and bemused. Foot half-out of the door.

I do not say this to diminish your kind. In truth, I find there is something endearing about the way your people live. Your desperate attachment to fleeting things, to purpose. Your lives may be tragically brief, but they are remarkably full. We fey have nothing but time.

The time we have spent together is nothing more than a passing season of my eternity, a drop in an endless ocean. Perhaps that is why I adopted this… façade, to make the inevitable winter of your absence easier to bear. To convince myself that losing you wouldn’t drown me. I am good at it, this act. You said so yourself, that first winter we met. When you asked what I wanted from you and I laughed and told you nothing worth asking. That was true, by the way. I have never once spoken a false word to you, for my kind cannot. Please, hold on to that later, when you are telling this tale to someone warmer than me. Kinder than me.

You think I never cared, or that I stopped caring along the way. Good. I made it so. Every idle cruelty, every time I arrived late and left early and let you watch me go without so much as a backward glance. I chose this path, and I am not one to abandon my ideals so carelessly.

One morning you wept quietly, thinking I was asleep. I lay with my eyes tightly shut, my hand loose on your hip, and I let you believe I felt nothing. Because feeling nothing is the greatest gift I have to give you, and I have never given you anything I did not weigh deeply upon, first. But you are going in the morning, and

I find I am not as good tonight as I was on all the other nights. The fire is burning low, desperate sparks spitting at the fender. Compassion is my curse to bear, and I feel it now, for those wretched embers, burdened with the imminent extinguishing blow of loss.

The spirit of loss mocks me now, as it points out death’s aching kiss at your temple where three grey strands of hair have sprouted that were not there in the spring.

I know the look on your face when you are lost in thought. I know the exact weight of your head when it goes heavy against my shoulder and you pretend you are not falling asleep. I know you in each frustrated flex of your fingers, each tightening of your jaw as you attempt to bite down your temper. I have been alive a long time and I remember almost none of it. And yet, I will remember all of you until the hollow hills wear flat.

Do you want to know why I keep my regard for you small? Truly?

It is not pride. I let you think it was so, because ego is easy to dismiss. I wanted you to find it easy to leave me behind.

Here is the thing I have never told you, because to tell you is the whole danger.

Among my people your word is binding. Not a promise, not a vow, a chain. If I spoke the truth, if I said the three plain words you tried to coax from me in the dark and never got, they would take hold of you the moment they left my mouth. You would be mine and I yours. Knotted at the root, and you would never again walk out of these hills and stay whole. Bound mortals do not go home. They stand at the threshold with the sun warming the road before them and they cannot make their feet cross or they fade, grey and thin at the edges like coal disintegrating to ash. All for wanting something they are not capable of holding.

I have watched it happen. I will not watch it happen to you.

So I say nothing. Every night, I have said nothing, and let you think the silence was the truth of me instead of the price of you.

Gods, but I wanted to. You have no notion of how close I came.

There were nights with your mouth against the hinge of my jaw and your breath going ragged. The words were right there behind my teeth, and holding them back felt like holding a hand against the turning tides of the sea.

You would have said yes. That is the worst of it.

You would have said yes and thanked me for the chain. By the turning of one season you would have been pressed against my window, aching for your home and I would have loved you still. It would have been my undoing.

I could not. I cannot. I love you too much to say the words. Look what a mess you have made of me. I sound like one of your own poets, and you know how I have always thought your poets to be decidedly senseless.

I want you to know that none of it was nothing to me. Not the first winter, nor the last. Not that time you swore in your people’s flat tongue and I laughed so hard, I frightened the birds off the thatch. Nor when you were feverish and I sat up the whole night with my palm on your brow, muttering that it was tedious work, that I had better things to do. All the while I was counting your breaths and bargaining with older and colder things than me to let you keep drawing them.

I have felt for you the entire time. Through every one of our meetings, of which there were not enough. There were never going to be enough. And I knew from the first that this was a thing I was borrowing and would have to give back, and yet I took it anyway. That is the only thing I have ever come to regret.

So you must go. In the morning, go. Set your feet on the road, feel the sun embrace your freedom and grow old the proper way, the way I never can. Surrounded by your clutter and your warmth and your people, who say the plain words out loud because saying them costs your kind nothing but a little courage. Marry someone with a name I will never learn. Lay your head on their shoulder. Be ordinary. Be whole. Be here and gone in the flicker of an eye that is all your life will be to me. And know, if you ever wonder, in the years when I am a story you half-believe you invented: I meant it. I meant all of it. I simply could not afford to say so.

The fire is nearly out and the birds are not yet up. We have a little dark left, you and I, and I am going to spend it putting that façade back on. I am going to find the bored, bright, careless thing you first mistook me for, and I am going to be him again before the light comes, so that when you wake I can watch you leave with the same easy smile that has cost me so much practice.

You will go thinking I did not care. That is the last gift, and the best one I can give.

Do not look for me on the road. I will not be there.

Let me pretend this means nothing, my dove.

It is the only way I get to keep it at all.