The word alone is hard for my mind to wrap around. Just looking at it flings me back two years, to the spring evening I was standing in the Prancing Pony, minding my own business. I had seen him a few times, a dark-haired rake, devastatingly handsome, cocky as a rooster in a henhouse. We'd traded a few daring smiles, a few lingering stares. He moved around Bree like he owned it. Did the same with the women. He was infuriating. Folk either hated him or loved him. I didn't know how to feel about him, either, when he slithered up to me and whispered in my ear that he'd rebuffed another woman's advances because of me.
That was the beginning of the end.
The end of my youth. The end of whatever innocence I still had left. The end of my sanity. The end of me feeling like myself, feeling comfortable, feeling confident in my own skin, feeling like I knew who I was and what I was about and...what I would and wouldn't do.
Why am I scribbling about all of this right now? It's well past midnight and I'm writing so fast I doubt I'll be able to read this in the morning. But I have to get it out. I don't think I'll be able to sleep either way.
He's back. In Bree. I saw him tonight. I swear it was him. My mind is still half-convinced I'm asleep and this is all some bizarre dream that I'll shake myself from.
It would be easier to believe if he hadn't sat and talked with me.
He looks older now. Still handsome, of course. He'll always be handsome. But he seems ages away from the dashing young cur that always had a different lady on his arm and never thought twice about it.
Well. Until he met "her".
He couldn't bring himself to say her name tonight. I looked at his tired face, his heavy eyes, the sad lines at the corners of his mouth, and I felt such anger. That he had been tortured for so long over this person. I don't know what took place, other than him telling me that "she lied", and that he had been on the road for gods know how long looking for her, and then just wandering alone, looking for his own self again.
I can relate a little bit.
All I know is that love doesn't destroy people like this. Whatever happened to him, it wasn't because of love. Oh, I know people who say they love when they really just mean they desire or they crave or they want this or that. I don't know many things in this world, but I know what love is, because my Pa and Ma loved each other, and they loved me, and I loved them. And it was real love. It feels like sunlight and it makes you warm from the inside out. It doesn't hurt you, it heals you. I don't think most of the world knows what love really is. And someone who lies and then goes on the run and lets a man half kill himself wandering the world over...well, that sure isn't love. And maybe he didn't love her, either. I don't know. Last I saw him, they were a fresh couple and he seemed content with his decision, though a little regretful, maybe. But the years in between, I don't know what filled them. I hope he'll share the story with me sometime.
I won't say I'm not worried. I am. I'm scared to death, honestly. But I'm not the same person I was two years ago. And I don't think he's the same man. Back then I would've called him arrogant, bold, reckless. Now I'd call him tired. That's the word that sticks out the most to me. His lips smiled at me but his eyes were so tired. Haunted eyes. I wanted to hold him and make that look go away. Childish notion, I know. As if someone can hug away pain and regret and scars just by the sheer sincerity of their wish to.
I swear, if I see him lolling around the Pony with some barmaid, I will deliver a kick to his groin personally.
No. I wouldn't. Would I? No, I wouldn't. Damn man.
I will hope that those habits are behind him now.
Curious things have been happening the past few nights. Odd, isn't it? I don't really believe in "fate" so much, but I have to stop and wonder what's going on. It can't all be coincidences. Something is moving. I can feel it, sort of like an energy in my bones or in the back of my thoughts.
