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Isaiah 64:6
All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
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xThe Woods
You'll wake up with a sudden hurt
With mouth and lungs all full of dirt
We went the two of us into
The woods behind the little school
Yet I'm still buried in the mud
Skin and bones and brains and blood
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xWho are you Jack Rabbit? Where are you going?
What will you do Jack Rabbit? Who are you following?
He was a rabbit born to run, a beating heart cage by flesh and bone. Raised on a fathers branding fist and a mothers sorrows. The carrier of others weight, draped across his shoulders. Jack was a great many things more than anyone would ever think of him. He wasn't the expectations that were misguidedly placed upon him. He wasn't his brother - the cataclysm that brought tears to his mothers eyes. He was the shadow of a good son, the second born regret that ached for liberation. Burned with the need to find his escape. To run and run till his lungs seized in his chest.
He never thought he would return home when he ran.
His feet had carried him across the imaginary borders, endless grassy fields and rocky hills. Through cities reduced to smog filled wasted and towns smaller even than the one he came from. Hopping trains from here to there, as far as it was away from anywhere he had been before. Sleepless nights were spent watching the stars in the sky, they never once judged the way he hid his face in the crook of his arm, the fears he felt only in the silence of the night released in sobs. In the day he would walk, and walk, and walk until his feet felt like lead weights.
And despite everything, he loved it.
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He thought he would be gone for good, a ghost of a memory to Edenholle and her kin. That he would never again see the way his mother smiled so sadly at him, as if her entire world had shattered just to see him, telling him "children should never be heard Jack." The way his fathers eyes shone so glossy by the light of the fireplace, the good book clutched in his hands like a lifeline, even as he drank deeply from the bottle at his side. But the world was cruel and his heart was funny in its ways.
He saw his brother, in some nameless city, in another nameless bar. He had told Jack then, that things had changed since he ran. Their father was gone, in the ground for years now and his mother - what remained of her, clung desperately to Machines for her life. So it was true then, that he would never see those things again. But it didn't mean he wouldn't ever see Edenholle again. There was no obligation, just a morbid curiosity. A need to see the headstone for himself.
He returned and saw that headstone.
He returned and held his mothers hand, for the very last time, as she passed.
Maybe it was wishful thinking but Jack felt as if she had waited for him. That maybe she had wanted to see him one last time before the end took her on. But experience told him that it simply had been time, and whether he had been there or not, clutching her hand, she would have gone on anyways. He had left her, and now she had left him, and it felt like the sharp slide of a double edged sword against his skin.
He became a ghost haunting the house he once grew up in, visiting the places he once made trouble in as a kid, the church even - but it had changed since he'd last been. Passed into new hands. Into eyes made of ice and a mouth that spoke the kind of truths that made Jack feel whole. His world had turned on its head, and devotion to his god became his salvation. The repentance he craved with the entirety of his being. Jack was a rabbit born to run. But Jack couldn't run anymore, not when that mouth opened, and spoke those words.
"You look lost Jack rabbit."
