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.