A Game of Colours

Chapter 30 Part 2

I awoke abruptly with a cry. I dreamt of Isaac again. The knife piercing his body, the widening of his eyes, the lips slightly parted and prepared to utter a word that would never be fulfilled. I saw his body, cold and lifeless and limp like it had never even felt the sun on its skin or the grass below its feet.

Dead. 

I thought about a lot of things in that moment. That one, spinning, endless, moment where everything I had ever felt and loved and dreamt collided in a spinning haze of emotions. But mostly I thought about Isaac. I thought about the way his eyes lit up with passion when he spoke. I thought about his hands, strong and warm and safe when they were clasped in my own. I thought about his endless, unwavering loyalty. His love. I thought about how it didn't matter in the end, whether he escaped his plantation or saved me or didn't save his brother or didn't save himself, because in the end there was only one path for all of us. For me, for him, for Jarrah, for Tom, the same, inevitable, unavoidable, and indestructible path. I wanted to hate that path. I wanted to say that he had so much more to do and to see here, and that no, I wasn't ready for Isaac to die, but I would never be ready for him to die, really, and he had died in a way that was fit only for someone who could love so deeply and so purely as Isaac did. 

I wanted to let him go, too. To say that the world did not deserve his kindness and his beauty, but I realized that the world did not care whether Isaac lived or died, whether he laughed or cried, whether he lived to see the next sunrise and fall asleep to the next sunset, because it went on without him. The world did not realize what it had lost that day. 

And in that way, I was like the world. I did not realize that I had lost something so unfit for words, that even the most glorious of praises was unfit for the man that was Isaac. 

I wanted to say he was in a better place now.

But I did not know.

All I did know was that wherever Isaac was, it was a better place with him in it, and that this world was a worse place without him in it.

I wanted to cry. To run. To scream. To get as far away from here, wherever here would be, and to where he was, but all that was left was his body. His only selfish act had been taking his soul with him, and away from me, and it was just another selfish thing that I had yearned for to wish that he had never left me.

I realized that it was not Isaac that I was mourning. It was what Isaac had given me that I was mourning. And in that moment, I was endlessly selfish and he was infinitely selfless, and it only made me love him all the more.

I closed my eyes for a long time. I allowed the anger to consume me.