Work Text:
Elias,
I took your advise. I traveled the world. I have been to different countries, chasing the happiness you thought I deserve. In a lot of ways, you were right. I loved my country for the privileges it afforded me, for the nation I imagined it could be and not as it was, nor as it is now. I wish you were right in this too: that I could find happiness.
Elias. Everyday, I think of the many points in time that our lives have entwined. I am haunted at night by the ghost of the better life you could have lived. I hear the tone of conviction of your voice as a steady buzzing in my ears. When you jumped on the lake that day, you took my heart with you. I am alive yet I feel drowned, unable to find my way to the surface. I understand now what you meant when you told me that a shared misfortune, a common calamity, is a greater something than happiness or peace.
I am sorry. But I am no longer willing to run away from my anger and my grief. I know you would detest me for the further suffering I will cause. I have no excuse. I only wish to confess.
No matter where else I am brought by fate, I cannot tear myself apart from this land like you wished I would. Not due to the circumstances of my birth, nor out of any pinprick of sentimentality. I only wish to see this land freed because I cannot pluck from the wind every speck of your scattered ash. Because here is the only sky that knew of your breath. Here is the only dirt that has kissed your feet. Any home I could have shared with you could have only been shared in this place.
If I could redo it all over again. I would have never come back here in the first place if it meant you would be alive in it. I am content with never seeing its crystal waters again if it meant I would never have to see it in red. I would have no ties to this land. I could abandon it over and over again if it meant that this land would never abandon you. If it could love you as fiercely as you it. But I could not, I only have the now, and the growing despair in my heart.
I cannot help myself from thinking of you, what you would say to me in this moment. Would you fight alongside me if you were here? Or would you finally stop justifying the belief you had in me? I would burn myself just to have you here, telling me that this light was not the one you saw in me. I crave to know what you would say, what you would do. But I have nothing left of you in this world, save this stupid piece of land, a land I love and loathe all the same, and whose only worth to me now is that it it was loved by you.
Forever sorry,
Crisostomo