a girl on a bench

It was his tone that soothed her. The tone that she had longed for and missed for countless years; years since she was a restless child wandering through empty woods with no gentle touch to guide her. The tone that she heard when she read her novels, where father LeBlanc would guide Marie Laure through the blinding cobbled streets of Paris and spin her in the air. She kept that moment and put it in her pocket and made sure of it that she would wear that same coat with its warm sound every time they spoke.
She was intrigued; by the way that he was intrigued, how he endlessly continued to read her, admire her traits, see what it was that tied them together. Something that he should have figured out years before, when he was missing from the place he should have been, yet it felt good, for it was something others had never done even when they had all the time in the world to do it. And just when she got hope, just when she believed in him again, for the first time since she was maybe ten, he disappeared again.
And so she wrote to him:

I know you don’t go to bed the same, tormented in pain by your memories — And you don’t wake up the same, because what’s there to gain from all of this. You look in the mirror and it’s there, staring back at you — Your past in every scar, ridged along your face — And I look at you, and I see the same. They say it was a blessing, that you made it back alive — God pulled you from the dead, out of the hospital bed — But is it true? Do you think you’re a better you? — Because I know you don’t go to bed the same, thinking about all the things you could drink — And I know you don’t wake up the same, looking in the mirror and seeing all your history there, in your missing hair. I gain the hope but I lose it, because you do too — And you go back to disappearing, and then wonder why no one stays there for you. Daddy-Day-Drinker, when will you ever think of her before you, and all that you missed — Daddy-Day-Drinker, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing left for me to give.