you aren't born with strength, you cultivate it

RHYS | It seems no one has their own eyes

Written/Published: 30 APRIL 2023

________

A look in the not-so pleasant past

________

"It seems no one has their own eyes

And we all speak from the cage

Are we living in fright?

Consenting to be washed away?"
"Washed away" | Emily Jane White

________

TW: death, grief, torture

________

With as much pressure as he can, while avoiding crushing fragile bone, he squeezes his grip. There's a responding force against his hand, so much tighter yet hardly painful. Somberly, charcoal-brown stares down at the pair of coffins. They take in every detail of the closed casket, the slight wear and tear of the cheap coffins mocking him. The way the wood, it could hardly be called that, glares, blaming him, cursing him. No tears leak from his eyes. They can't. He's not allowed to grieve. He can't allow himself to break, to crash under the otherworldly pressure that likened him to Atlas. But he wasn't holding all of the heavens on his shoulders. No, he's holding the weight of guilt and responsibility. So different yet similar.

Annabel-Lee and Jolon Valentine weren't allowed to see the sky before they are shoved into the ground to be forgotten. The pair, once lively and bright, are cold cold cold. Their souls have departed, and their skin would likely be icy to the touch. That is, if he was allowed the liberty of hugging them one last time. Heavily unlikely. He would never be able to see them again. All he can cry for are these wretched coffins that hardly complement the life his parents led.

Not even their funeral held aspects of their old, booming life. Only him and a few other people bothered to show. He could spot his aunt, from his father's side, standing with her head bowed and hands gripped together in front of her. There are tears streaming endlessly down her grief-stricken face and she hardly acknowledges her wife's presence on her left shoulder. Keyes Valentine-Ahuvati hardly looks like Jolon. With her paper-white skin tone and smattering of freckles along her cheeks, not to mention her short height and cherry-blonde hair, she looked more like the pictures of his great-grandmother. His pseudo-guardian's blotchy face further pushed the differences to the forefront of his mind. She didn't even have his father's pronounced jawline or his narrow, slim nose.

Rhys turns his attention to the little girl treating his hand as a lifeline. Her poor, underdeveloped mind couldn't truly comprehend the preceding. All the eight-year-old girl knew was that her parents, her best friends, were never coming back. An impossibly sad expression engulfed her youthful, baby-fat face. Creases of a grief-like emotion pulled taut at her lips and cheeks. Tears have long-since dried on her cheeks, leaving behind track marks along her chubby cheeks. Her dark brown, almost black, hair is strung up in a messy ponytail. He had trouble working with her hair. Keyes had refused to do anything with it and instead laid on her bed, motionless. Slowly, the young girl turns up to him, lip quivering as she tugs at his hands incessantly. Her bright brown almost forced the tears blocked in his ducts to free. Instead of speaking, even if she had the device that helps her hear connected, he smiles as reassuringly as he can.

The eleven-year-old is relieved when she drags her gaze from him, he couldn't bear the sad look stuck to her face. Nor could he stand the inquisitive, information-seeking stare in eyes identical to his. Rhys didn't either understand what it meant for someone to die. Keyes' wife, Liliana, was kind enough to explain that his parents were in a place better than Earth, where they are without any pain or sickness and left to live free. To which he had asked "why didn't they bring us with them?" only for the woman to freeze and excuse herself from the living room.