[Note: In which I post barely-edited rambles before disappearing for another several months, with a side of mid-2010's acoustic music because my taste has not aged as it should. Cheers!
Getting started, it has been said, is the most difficult part of a journey. This truism is misleading. The starting takes a push out the door, yes, but once one has overcome the initial trepidation, continuing on is perhaps even easier than expected. So easy, in fact, that the most difficult step of any journey is rarely the starting, but the stopping.
Nauraa has been here in Bree-land for many months – too many months now, always thinking that this was just a brief delay on another, larger journey. There is so much she has avoided doing, since that would be too permanent, too much a declaration of residency. Other than one dress, her pack still sits fully prepared in the corner of her room, as though she plans to leave at any moment. She has never really insisted on her houseguest mending the roof, since she had not planned to live in the house as more than a temporary measure. She has held friends at arms’ length, telling herself she would be leaving them soon. It is now late summer, the nights cooling and the days growing shorter, and what had been meant as a week or two of preparations for the trip to Gondor now looks to be much longer.
Despite all this, she has grown more comfortable than she had ever wanted to here. She has a comfortable place to live (if one ignores the bats roosting in the hole in the attic), a steady stream of work, and without ever realizing it, her life has settled into a steady ebb and flow. She is content here, to sit at the end of the path with her fabric in a basket and wait for Orenn’s whistle to carry up the road. The knowledge makes her feel a sudden pang of guilt – she knows that she does not belong here, that duty would send her home and ambition would set her on the road again, but the appeal of this place belongs to neither. As long as she is here, she is somewhere-in-between.
She is afraid of what he will ask when she tells him this.
Stay here. Stay with me.
She can practically see him asking, the strand of hair that always falls across his forehead and the way one of his eyebrows always goes higher than the other when he makes things a question, the way one of his freckles disappears into a dimple when he smiles.
No, she is less afraid of the question than she is of how she would answer.
Would it be so bad if she said yes? Everything else that has happened has been leading to something else. What if it all had led her here? She can hear her own answer even before she knows it fully.
Let me go to Gondor and visit home, at least.
She can see his brow furrow at the reply.
That’s’a big long way t’say no. I’d be waitin’ for you, and you’d be thinkin’ of reasons not to come back. If it ain’t a yes, it’s a no.
He is honest, painfully incapable of saying anything other than the first thing he thinks. She likes that about him. She hates that she feels tempted not to be honest in return.
Come with me, then.
I’m no fighter, Nauraa, I’ve told ye that. My life is here. My family, too.
The cart slows and stops to the tune of the younger Orennson children asking her whether she had brought the rabbit for them to feed, and she finds it harder now than before to meet his eyes as he helps her down. She cannot ask this of him — to give up a life he has no desire to leave behind…and for what? Pride? Duty? Faith? Even she cannot answer that for herself.
No, it is not right to force that choice on him. It is an impossible one, and he would come to hate her for it, whether he stayed or went.
When she goes into the house, the man has hung back, and the thought plagues her again.
Come with me. This is the only thing I will ever ask of you.
It is the one thing she cannot bring herself to do — to risk one more loss if he, too, should grow tired and leave.
She has lost enough already.
