So long now, so many years, he has wandered through each day like some lonely, forsaken ghost…insubstantial and hollow…his constant yearning and need screaming from inside the shell of what passes for his life…unheard by those around. He drifts from thing to thing, place to place…lost for so long now without his compass, his north star. He endures every day the pain of knowing that the only light to ever shine in his life…the only one that had illuminated the darkness inside…was gone, irretrievable, except in memories that grew dimmer with time. How blue were those eyes? How soft the touch? How captivating the laugh? His anguish at the fading of these precious memories like acid, painted stroke by stroke on his heart.
He walks through a familiar field in the mountains as he has done so many times before…isolating himself from all the others out there…those others who never understood the enormity, the depth of this thing…this love…this experience that had filled his heart for what seemed so short a time.
He walks deeper into the brush and trees still not satisfied that eyes aren't prying, judging, and whispering. His walk more unsteady now. It's increasingly difficult to see where he's going with the tears that spring to his eyes. He stumbles once, catches himself. He stumbles again falling to his knees…a moan of intense anguish escaping the lips that had been sealed around the judgmental world he had to exist in.
He falls to all fours, sobs breaking painfully free, back heaving with the pain of emotion too long held in check. His heart hammers, his body shakes.
All gone…still gone…always gone, he thinks. Only darkness stretches into what remains of his life without the one light that the Universe had seen fit to show to him, entice him with…then rip away.
The tears flow with nothing and no one to restrain them. Thoughts and memories flood his brain ravaging the self-control that is only precariously held at best. Scenes and recollections pour forth of stolen glances over the fire, the electric shock of an inadvertent touch, the tightness in the chest at the thought that someone cared.
He feels now…what he had with great effort kept from his consciousness…two hands twisted in his jacket…a piercing look of need, the grinding press of a kiss demanding a response of passion, the rhythm of two bodies striving to become one, the explosion and loss of self in release. All these memories fading, diminishing shadows of what had once been reality…that reality, he daily repeats like a mantra, gone now, lost…not just out of reach…but non-existent, incorporeal, vanished from space and time for all eternity.
In his mind, he kneels at the edge of a dark, despairing abyss…right on the edge…so close, so close. He sees the darkness, the oblivion that would erase all the pain…erase all the memories of that once clear and joyous light. But I can't. It's been so long…but it's all that's left, it's all I have left.
Suddenly all is taken from him. The abyss collapses, he tumbles through the darkness out of control.
In the forest, his body spasms once…twice. His breathing slows.
He reaches out for purchase as he falls through the darkness. He reaches for all the memories…reaches for the pain and anger, the loss and emptiness…anything to hold onto the one thing that gives his life meaning of any kind.
But what he grabs…what he finds himself holding onto now…is that so-familiar hand, that touch he thought was gone forever. His gaze is helplessly drawn to those blue eyes he never tired of looking into, those lips always asking to be kissed, that quirky smile given only to him. He hears that voice saying quietly, "It's alright. It'll be alright."
He lays back quietly, easily. The pain and anguish, guilt and recrimination held tightly, painfully to his heart all those years fading like fog, like a bad dream exposed to the light of day…and in its place an indescribable joy.
He had never been far from his one love he sees now. They had only ever been separated by a short distance…the slightest of spaces.
"Jack," he breathes softly.
"Ennis," he whispers longingly.
No more loss…no more separateness for either…no more until the need for lessons to learn comes again.
They embrace.
Home…home together again.