He tore a hole in the sky. That's how it feels.

It'll be a beautiful, sunny day, hardly a cloud in sight, children screeching as they run about; everything as it should be. Life goes on. And yet there'll be this hole, right there in the blue, and it waits, waits with its steep walls, its mists and its depths, waits for me to fall into it. To follow him down.

I try to ignore it, to focus on the blue, to listen to the running and the screaming, the happy fake screaming of children who need something to be scared of, who look for monsters, scary things they can run from, all the while laughing, alive with their own gleeful panic. I try to hear that, and feel the breeze, to breathe in the air, and go on, looking straight ahead into the blue, but the whole time I know it's there, that rip in the sky, and I think of him making it.

I think of him leaving.

I think of him leaving all this, and wonder, wonder despite myself, where did he go? What was so wonderful about it, what is down there, down there at the bottom, and what made it so strong, so irresistible? And I find myself turning towards it, trying to make it out, struggling to see it clearly, and feeling, feeling despite myself, there's only one way to do that and that is to follow him, to follow him down there to wherever he went.