mo(u)rning, pt. iii

We ended up about as far from civilization as you can get. Neither of us were as pissed about it as probably we should have been--it meant that he won, that we couldn't even escape him when he was fucking dead, but we'd been on the road for so long it felt less like losing and more like just finding a place to settle down. I don't know how much the locals knew, but they didn't ask questions and they weren't on the grid. Officially this place didn't exist. They let me wait tables at the village inn, which didn't pay much but they gave us one of the rooms and three hot meals a day. Morgan worked odd jobs around town. There wasn't much money to go around but we felt like part of something, you know?

I started waking up before dawn and going out for a long walk, just on my own, until I found a clearing where I could just sit and watch the sun rise over the lake and reflect. The lives we'd had before weren't easy, but they were gone now, and some mornings it took a minute to remember that we weren't still in the city. We weren't on the road, either. All of that, all the good and the bad, was gone. It seemed worth mourning, even if I wouldn't have traded the peace of this place to get it all back even if I could.

So, whatever the weather, I'd take my breakfast out to the lake, I'd sit under the tree I started thinking of mine, and I'd reflect on everything we'd lost. The constant buzz of activity of the city, the freedom to go wherever we wanted, do whatever we wanted, to just hit the open road and go without thinking of it. The friends we had at home, the companions we met along the way.

Some days, my little mourning ritual was accompanied by the brilliant pinks and golds and reds of the sunrise, when everything seems so unfathomably beautiful; sometimes it was dull and grey and wet, sometimes it was bitterly cold, sometimes I'd find myself covered in snow by the time I wandered back into town--beautiful and unpleasant all at once. It seemed right, somehow. The life we'd lost was all of these things: beautiful and bleak and painful and wonderful, all at once. If I was to mourn it properly, it was important to me to remember that.