Habitual Heartache
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Don't be too quick
To break bad habits: better stick,
Like the Mission folk, to your arsenic.
The Wonderful Spring of San Joaquin. Bret Harte
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He has a tendency of smiling when he doesn't mean it- when children wail at the sight of his skeletal hand and the Yard eyes him with a sort of wariness he has come to expect since his days of being unwanted. No longer camouflaged in the filth of the London streets, he dons his expression like his cape- all vibrant color to be flourished for a little coin. And when they snicker and laugh and enjoy what a fool he is, he lowers his face and hopes the mockery isn't too evident in his bow.
He has a habit of pretending that this isn't submission. Be it the center of the stage or the corner of a derelict workhouse, his smile- his obeisance- closes the act. And when father's words are harsh, lunatic demands sending shudders down a still human spine, he closes his eyes, envisions these hundreds of delighted faces, and bends with a well practiced grace.
It is precisely these habits, these knee-jerk reactions to every day horrors, keeping his head above the mire.
It is when he smiles and he means it that he feels himself sinking- into her minute touches and the scent of lilies on her pale skin. And when her dark eyes look up at him, mirroring a too familiar hunger, he forgets that he is not supposed to smile.
He has a penchant for torturing himself with what could have been. Shivering alone beneath the sheets of a still cold bed he remembers her warmth, her feeble breath floating in the wintry air and a child's hands pressed against his, then, too thin frame. Dangling the image of her, beautiful and still starved for his affection, behind closed lids he remembers her softness and imagines her grown up hands, still cold, against his feverish skin.
When he sees a curly-haired child at the circus he finds himself imagining her- her breasts heavy over a swollen belly or a babe with two arms, two fat, dimpled legs and a mop of ginger curls. He's content that these bad habits hurt no one but himself.
Or so he thought until the night he felt her arms around him- her breath as hot as he imagined and her tears burning down his sleeve. For the first time he smiles at her though he doesn't mean it; smiling like she hasn't voiced a dream he thought only he was masochistic enough to believe. And he smiles and pretends he hasn't left her crying in the darkness, clinging to these bad habits against the one he cannot shake.
He swallows the burn of habitual heartache like a poor man's gin, and reminds himself happiness is a yoke under which they both would break.