As the ice thins, so does your certainty.

The prodigal son returns to you as you sit in a cabin in the woods. Two months ago, you gave away his medallion to the brother who stayed. When you cry on the line to your best friend, you find yourself wondering if you will ever actually pick up the phone to call him. You have lost him so many times—surely there comes a point where lost things should remain that way, forever floating in if-onlys and the mistakes you wish neither of you had made.

- - -

The man you're seeing—the ravens' wings—is more like the tide than anyone you've ever met, and you wonder what it means that you have always been so attracted to the ocean. Sometimes you think you've never met anyone better. Others, you're certain you are destined to fall for the people who don't fit you in just the right way.

You find yourself crying at the foot of his bed at 4 AM, and, like so many other times, your mind is pulled back to the boy with the kokopelli tattooed on the worst of the scars on his left wrist. He once held you as you cried at the end of his bed and told you not to be afraid. Until a few weeks ago, you thought you would somehow end up spending the rest of your life with him. Now, you are only nineteen and confused. You have no destiny, and the red thread you have been following through the dark has reached its frayed and broken end. The kokopelli boy is not there to meet you. He never was.

The ravens' wings asks what' wrong, and you words catch in your throat.

I miss believing in a god, you try to say. I miss when I thought I wasn't going to end up alone like my mother, filled with delusions like my father. I miss thinking there were forces in the world that cared. But even you have to admit that isn't all of it, not really. As you lay on your stomach on his bed, head in your hands, you try to tell him that you miss the feeling of wanting to be alive. You have never felt this happy and this empty at the same time. It's a hint, as if you ever needed it, that you are destined for this for as long as you're alive—discontent and unrest, and happiness that never quite reaches the places it's trying to heal.

An hour and a couple cigarettes later, you turn off the light and go back to bed, because it's easier than trying to explain this to your barely-lover, and you're not sure you can stand the desperate attempts to make you laugh much longer. Besides, sleep is better than sitting there and wanting to be dead.

- - -

Your chosen brother weighs heavily on your mind for days. You still have yet to pick up the phone. Part of you wants to, the way it always has. It's the part of you that felt that you would always be okay, if only you could find him and talk to him. It's the part of you that was born in a room full of holes, of paper wristband, of Enya played too fast on an out-of-tune piano.

The rest of you is not so sure. You're afraid of hearing the drugs in his voice again. Or, maybe worse, you're afraid he will be entirely sober, and entirely unfamiliar. You're not sure you could handle that, not while you're spending most of your time sleeping to keep the thoughts of pills and sharp things at bay.

If you're being honest with yourself, he has always been the one person in your life with total power to break you, and you have spent six years letting him, in one way or another. Your walls are stronger now than they were the last time this happened, and you know you will never be in love with him again, but you think that if anyone could tear you down to nothingness, it would be him.

You stare at his number in your phone for a long time, but you don't press the button. You flip it closed and swap inane videos with the ravens' wings instead.

Sometimes it's easier to just let things continue as they are. You think, If there's a brick wall at the end of this straightaway, at least I'll have an excuse to be a little broken.

Yes, sometimes it's easier to let things continue as they are, even if that's full of a muted pain in your chest and tears that come without warning. Even if that means lying through your teeth to every other person you have to speak to. Even if it means you've started not being able to leave your bedroom without makeup for the first time in years. After all, continuation, however mediocre, is better than the alternative.

And that's what you tell yourself every time you realize, all over again, that you want to die.

So far, it's working.