Walking Out Together

He had given her totality, subsumed his very essence to pander to her every whim. She had taken him, turned him inside out and wrung his last modicum of self into the lake of her selfishness. And yet he continued. Kept kneeling at the foot of her skyward height and cast his grey eyes upon her. Never holding back, never keeping anything in reserve, for himself.
He wouldn’t again be the man he was once, subject of occasional wayward glances. In the end he was so completely hers she hadn’t even noticed he was there. He wore his heart on so much more than just his sleeve.
When she said she was leaving he could think of only a safe journey for her. Why would it even occur to him what he would be losing?
She would never give him a second thought.
And he would wait for her, wait forever if that was what was needed.

Forty years passed. The glances changed like seasons. The budding lust of spring to the summer wind of love. Others autumnal anger to the cruel hatred of a long harsh winter.
But wrapped in a cloak of his love for her he was safe from any element.

He outlived them all, except for her.

She did return, once, by chance, and didn’t even know she had been there before. Stood on the rocks she felt nothing, saw nothing. His bones long mingled with the glacial silt.