Chapter Text
I am.
It’s been a while since I have been.
Or have I been for a while? It’s hard to know.
When you have been for as long as I have been, being can so often feel like
unbeing. unbecoming. undone.
to be or not to be?
I fucking hated shakespeare.
Something has shaken the dust from my echoing hall, beckoning in the same light,
the same footsteps sprawled across the flagstone like a map, the same ink running across the
same but different pages. The same but different. Yes. I am the watcher of the walls. I do not change.
And yet the air is different today. Lighter. Warmer. Fuller. I am not empty. I am emptier. Something
has arrived. Something is still missing. I am the watcher. I wait. Arms spread wide, eyes raised high.
The child.
Reaching. Hoping. Receiving.
It has been so very long since the yearning child of these halls has found the waiting hands on their father, grasping them tight, pulling them up onto giants shoulders, holding them in place with the sanctified concern of a small life in their hands. The undercurrent of terror that every parent suppresses deep within them, hoping their child can never see them. The love that drives a father afraid of heights to the top of a ferris wheel, or a mother scared of death to wave goodbye as their first born gets on a plane, taking them far away.
The child.