Now he was crying. His mind had stopped presenting him novel, even rational, ideas, but his heart kept beating. Having abandoned most of his inhibitions in the wake of this inevitable grief, he spoke shamelessly freely. "Nobody will understand me." There was a slight pause, but only that which is common to such a change in subject.
"You never understood anything."
Her weakening voice stabbed at his will with accurate words: he had already supposed his ignorance, but feared its veracity. Clutching at the remnants of a fading sentimentality, he said, somewhere between scoffing and pleading, "I thought that this could be a world without pain, and without uncertainty."
"That's because you thought that everyone else felt the same as you do."
"You betrayed me!" he cried, his sadness bursting into anger. He was so poorly composed that he unfairly targeted even her. "You betrayed my feelings!"
"You misunderstood from the very beginning. You just believed what you wanted to believe."
She spoke calmly, her words not scornful but truthful. He was not sedated, his anger waxing cold into wrath. Surrendering to its perverse satisfaction, he decreed rashly and greedily, "Nobody will want me. So they can all just die." A short silence followed, and she feebly lifted her head to face his.
"Then what is your hand for?"
Her warm consolation scalded him with more tears, and, avoiding its potential comfort, he spuriously cried, "Nobody will care whether or not I exist. Nothing ever changes. So they can all just die."
"Then tell me: what is your heart for?"
All his anger had exhausted itself, and he lay numb and spent. Defeated by the truth behind her kindness, he elected the path of least resistance. Averting his eyes, he admitted, "It would be better if I never existed. I should just die, too."
"Then why are you here?"
These words raced through the smog that shaded his mind, piercing the cynical aloofness he had shaped into a safeguard. Maybe she altruistically wanted him to live; more than that, maybe she really wanted him to be happy. By this accusation of worth, he thought she might be revealing that she, that somebody, actually deemed the world better for his having been in it. "Is… Is it okay for me to be here?"
He again met her gaze, and promptly felt a surge of sickly warmth, like venomous butterflies in his stomach: she stared emptily past him. He stayed his movements, and found that she was still. Trembling at the thought that he had stolen her last moments, he listened for another breath as fresher tears flooded his eyes. Silence was all she could answer.
So he echoed her answer: "No."
There are things we can't recall, blind as night that finds us all;
Winter tucks her children in, her fragile china dolls,
But my hands remember hers, rolling 'round the shaded ferns.
Naked arms, her secrets still like songs I'd never learned.