Author's Note: This fits into the time period just following the end of Enough (which, yes, I'm well aware is not finished), and it reflects the tone of many of my other non-gapfiller, Legolas-centric stories. This is about the devastating power of unresolved grief, and the difficulty of arriving at forgiveness when there is only a memory to work with. This feeling likely resonates, to some extent, with most people, regardless of whether or not they know my characterizations or particular plots. Anyway, I hope you can enjoy it.

Bookmarks

To a mother (who is not one) in a moment of need

I have not thought on you in a while,
but I have waited for you every evening, in my own way,
searching in between the stars cast above me,
so bright and so wide like the sea you fled across,
though not as finite as that, for they are ever steady—
not a full-stop bookmark in the pages of your children's lives,
for we dance around them and they about us,
and they are every season exactly the same.

The things you took when you left us are many,
but the things you took before you left us are more—
your blood on my hands and mine on yours,
the end of two childhoods or perhaps even more,
surety and safety, and my sister's favorite ledger.

After you broke, Mother, it felt like this whole place broke, too—
one thing after another fell apart until it was as if the whole sky
cracked into chunks to crash down upon us—
we could not breathe; I spent more time in the South
and less time in the halls, and when you finally sent
our sister back to us, you sent her back missing
parts of herself.

We put her back together, but, it seems, after all this time,
that it is me who has broken her again.

You see, yesterday, the darkness of this place was lifted cruelly
for a moment—its rage having built from within—
and there was no time to think, to feel, as the trees groaned
and those horrid bats fell burning from the sky about us,
large and black and mammalian and screeching.

I was under the branches—cut off from the sky, a million miles away
from hope—and I was to choose between her and her love, to decide
the rest of her life for her without a moment's notice—

so even as I pushed through the smoke in blindness,
Mother, even as I felt the cloth wrapped round my face begin
to scorch and crinkle, as I felt dead things crunch and burn underfoot,
as I ran with everything I had in me and I asked myself what
I was made of and for whom my heart beat
were this to be my last moment alive…

Even then: How could I have chosen anything but her?
How will I ever, Mother, when you have sent her back
to me for safekeeping, to be guarded by someone
who fears he will never be whole again himself?

This is the thing, I think: My sister, now, is a book
without an ending, stuck at your arbitrary bookmark,
and we read the same paragraph over and over and over again—
we are swirling about her, trying to keep her upright
whatever the cost, but we are losing the fight,
though I have tried my best.

So this is it:

I look every night between the stars;
I search between pages of books long forgotten
and untouched, long unloved and unsought,
unlistened to for years—

I search them for an answer, Mother, but the only thing
I have found with surety is that the ground beneath my back
is more steady a thing than anything
I might have gotten from you.

Do you think, Mother, from over there—wherever it is elves actually go
when they leave—Do you think you could take out the bookmark
you left in me, and just let me be?

For it is a long life, carrying a family's weight on your back
as a darkened wood presses down on your front.
It is a long life, Mother, out here every night,
searching the stars for a thing you will never find,
and knowing that even if you did,
you would not like it at all.

Please take back your bookmarks—
we are ready for you to go.