Nick

by Michael Farris Smith

Hiraeth (n.): a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.

So much that he wanted to say to her but he could not as if there were chains attached to his words and he was sentenced to a life of introspection.

And they would be there to share in a sadness but who would be there to mourn? To gasp and pray and hurt and hope for his soul?

It’s crazy what your mind can do to you. I always thought it was supposed to be your friend but it’ll give you up quick as anything.

carrying the punishment of having survived.

Sit down and eat, he thought. Then sleep. You cannot run from yourself.

Held by the dark. Seized into the void because he hadn’t been bad enough to go to hell or good enough to ascend to heaven and he was only here.

“My Episcopal nature doesn’t allow me to see it as clearly as you see it.” “Then don’t be Episcopal.” “I haven’t been. Not for a long time. But some things are inside of you whether you want them to be or not.”

She had thought her abductor was the worst of our kind but then learned that he had only been a desolate father with no way to understand the suffering that the world had cast upon him. She closed her eyes and breathed in the odor of despair and asked him for forgiveness for what they had done to his child though she knew there was no such thing.