Thoughts Race, Sprite-Like, Through My Mind

            “I’m leaving tomorrow,” her voice was hardly a whisper, as she spoke to his dark silhouette that evening, on the back porch of the Tyler estate.

            He did not move, did not turn to her, did not make any motion to indicate that he had heard her. He remained stiff, silent and resolute. He was a god, after all, and tears did not become him – especially tears shed over a mortal girl.

            “…I’d really like it if you were there. You know…say goodbye…and everythin…” for a moment, she thought about going to him, thought about touching his shoulder or saying something tender. But she knew him well enough by now to know that her words would only make it worse.
         
           So instead, she retreated into the mansion, into its seemingly endless depths and left him to stare at the stars and ponder what sort of cruel, malicious higher power deemed it necessary for him to land on this particular patch of planet.
         
          He wondered bitterly, for a second, if it was some cruel trick of Odin’s. Some cruel torture designed to teach him a lesson about love, life, about what’s worth fighting for and when to let it go. He scoffed at the notion, thinking to himself that the only thing he had truly learned in the past few months, the only thing he had truly, desperately begged for in the past few months is that he would have landed on literally any other plane of grass on any other plane of existence. Anywhere, any time but this.

            I have buried you

            Every place I’ve been

            You keep ending up

            In my shaking hands.

            It is the evening after she has left. He knows that she has gone. He can feel her absence in this universe as surely as he can feel the chill of the night or the rushing of the blood in his veins. He wanders along the beach from where she departed. He’d heard about this beach before, in her stories about her former life. He had seen the images in her mind’s eye, had pondered curiously how one place could hold so much pain for one small mortal.

            Now that he is here, he no longer ponders. He can feel the misery seeping from the place. He can sense it in the waves that lap at the shore, can very nearly hear it radiating from every grain of sand that fills the beach: her words, her tears, her haunting wails of despair let loose as the mad man in the blue box was snatched away from her. Now it is his misery, his pain, that haunts the air.

            He stands before the water, allows the waves to nip at this toes. He kneels, catching a handful of sand in his fist. Slowly, he lets it go, marveling at the way the sand slips through his fingers, as it always would, and realizes very clearly for the first time that she was always going to slip away from him and no matter how hard he might’ve clutched, she was always going to leave. He lets the last few grains filter from his fingers and opens his palm. He notices, somewhat suddenly, that his hand is shaking, and then, that all of him is shaking.

            He notices this, and stares out at the water, and in one horrible moment all of his pain, all of his heartache, floods out of him. For miles around, the only sound that can be heard and the only sound that matters is his screech, his guttering howl, echoing a sorrow so deep as to be immeasurable, innumerable. It is the sound of heartbreak. It is the sound of newborn rage.         

          Once he is done, once he is hoarse and nothing but an empty coldness rests inside his stomach, he stands. He shakes the sand from his hands, dusts off his clothes, and strides from the beach.           

        No more, he thinks. No more will he be haunted. No more will he be inhibited or swayed by the inconsequential feelings of tiny, puny, easily-crushed and easily-lost humans. He will rise, he will become the king he was always meant to be and he will do it without her. Gladly, effortlessly, happily, he will do everything without her.           

       And he will go forward every day, thinking these thoughts, willing and wishing away the image of the golden-haired girl that refuses to leave him. Desperately, despairingly, he will wish her away and it will be just another endeavor at which he fails to succeed.
          
            I have buried you
            Every place I’ve been
            You keep ending up
            Every place I am