Eden

"I guess I just don't understand why you let it get to you so much. I mean, its been years. You're grown up, you have a life, you shouldn't let your past affect you so much."

Through the window the sound of a passing car swished slowly through the room. The soft rustling of its tires filling the pause as her friend took a a slow drink of her tea.

"Besides," she continued "so many people have had it worse and managed to put it all behind them."

Eden sat quietly, her fingers tapping restlessly on the arm of her couch. The habit made her self conscious but she couldn't seem to get the better of it. Staring sightlessly over Dakota's shoulder she wondered at the tension in her hand when the question left her feeling so cold.

What good were words anyway?

She had trouble meeting Dakota's gaze but leaned back a little against the well worn cushion of her couch. Dakota made it sound so simple.

"It would have been better if it had been great. Big, I mean. One event, one villain, one terrible tragedy I could lean on. At least then I could have set myself against it, had something to fight. I think that would have been bearable. The horrible part of it was just how boring it was, how...banal. A lifetime of small failures and well-manicured ignorance, and all of it treated so routinely. My own little clockwork hell. Even the big betrayals seemed more out of frustration or neglect than any kind of real malice. But they were everywhere; every day in small ways and in big ways until the goddamn weight of them filled the sky. Even at the end there, when things got really bad, it was all so clinical. The councilors took their notes, policemen filed reports, the doctors made their charts. Everything documented, filed and collated like that was all that needed to happen. My fucking Being reduced to a spreadsheet, another job well done."

There was knot in her center now. She shifted slightly to try and ease it.

"How can I possibly rest easy here? In a world like that? There were no demons, no monsters, just people going blandly about their lives while I drowned alone right beside them. Can you really expect me to feel safe? Just a bloated machine grinding away with no place for anything I was. Just apathy and survival. If it had been a catastrophe I might of lost the moment, I may have even lost the people, but at least I might have kept the world intact."

"At least I could have left."

The room was quiet, Dakota sat across from her absently studying the decor and checking her phone in turn.

None of Eden's thoughts had been said out loud. Instead she'd mulled them over quietly knowing Dakota felt confident she had said her piece. A half-tense quiet lay between them as Eden contemplated the middle distance alone.

"Maybe you're right" she said.

The dark night of the soul was a sacred place. You couldn't soil it with profanity and not expect some disaster. There was a ritual to be observed, a cleansing and washing and humbling to perform before you could step into the holy of holies. If done properly, reverently, it might offer absolution and rebirth. To treat it like a laundry list might leave you a broken mess instead. Looking at Dakota she felt the gulf of light years between them, stretching out like an infinite abyss in that small sunlight room. She couldn't begin to imagine what engines she would need to build to cross that span, and the thought of it left her feeling tired in her soul.

If one could not speak greatly of great things, better to say nothing at all.