"Kept taking wrong turns," he muttered softly. "Kept heading to places I remembered, not the places I knew were there. The only thing worse than wondering where everybody had gone was the remembering. And I never... never dealt with that. I'm still working my way up to accepting that I'm allowed to."

Words were hard. It felt like fingers were closing around his throat and his lungs, trying to crush his attempts at speaking away.

"I'm allowed to feel it now. It's safe. And I don't even know how."