Portraits of The Songs | BON IVER

IV. Towers (+Lisbon, OH)

"I love you, Owie," she had said. Her soft words echoing inside his head, "Always have, always will."

That tightening feeling in his chest wasn't unfamiliar to him now, everytime those words uttered out from her mouth. All in honesty, he was certain. How? He didn't know.

He couldn't even recall when it was the first time he ever felt that way, probably since the first time he ever met the girl.

That girl.

She was no one in particular. He didn't know her, didn't care about her, certainly didn't feel inclined to care for her, at the time, and he honestly asked to himself why is it that he tried so hard to care for her.

He just once upon a time stumbled upon her, literally, not-figuratively speaking, in a certain one swampy august dawn beyond pissed at himself, when he was shoved out of that dingy bar after getting quite fruit-punched in the face by some dude he didn't even know. He remembered he almost crushed her if not for his reflex to manage to move away just in time. And he swore if he missed by milisecond, he would've made her cry even harder, screaming out the top of her lungs.

She was barely three, maybe two, he could tell, but she was alone. Sitting abandoned in front of the broken down warehouse that had also been long forgotten by its people, no matter how many years it had been there to served its purpose for people.

Life is like that, for him, most of the times. And he realized that he actually deserved it. But this kid, sitting next to him, she didn't deserve it.

She was alone. Like him. With nobody who took care of em.

And what kind of kid actually deserve being tossed like that?

He took sneakly glances down at her, seeing her crying in silence. Her body claded in only a thin plain tee and a torn jeans, her little feet bare. He'd never seen her before.

She looked up to him with snotty nose, gooey things sliding out her nose, still crying and he'd been trying his hardest not to cry over the burning pain on his face. Either way the silent tears of said pain still managed to scroll down his face, across his battered and bruised one, his swollen cheeks and all.

And then, ironically, both started crying together for a good thirteen minutes.

"Where's your ma?" He had asked. And she only cried harder.

"Your pa?"

She hiccuped, "He not want me."

Upon hearing that his tears streamed down harder, but luckily he didn't need to admit that to her. He wanted to say to her that he want her, even just so she knew she was still loved in this world. If not by her own pa, then by a creepy stranger like him.

It was the tight feeling in his chest that told him to do what he did back then. To try to do the right thing for her because a little being like her didn't deserve all this--

So he took her in.

Not to his home. Because he's not a creep, nor a kidnapper. And in-the-most-actuality, because he had no place to call home.

So, no. He directed her to the nearest police office, so that perhaps she was just lost and her parents were actually crazy mad looking for her and then she could go back home and live happily. But sadly, that was not the case.

Because after two weeks of wandering around the dark alleys and cheap bars and else with him, nobody was looking for her.

She was abandoned. Alone. Like him.

And since then it's been the two of them against the world.

She was the oddball. The little kid had so much energy that sometimes frustrated him beyond belief, asking endless questions about everything and about nothing.