Suddenly, the world felt a lot bigger, and the floor was a lot closer than it’d been. More present. More real. He just sank into it, pulling his knees to his chest as much as he could, still staring. The emotions were eating their way up his chest, clawing their way out with a gentle ferocity that bled, painful and hot, through every crevice of him. It hurt, but it was also - waiting. It was a hesitating, loitering sort of damage, waiting for him to let it sink in. Waiting for him to realize the full intensity of it, and for the slight distance of shock to whittle away into something meaningless. Something permeable.
Whatever the opposite of awe-inspiring was, it was this.
This dread, the sheer unfathomable depths of it. The certainty, no matter how far he stepped back, he’d never even see the edges of the grief.
"You were supposed to come back."