"To that point, I love spending money. Earning it is where the sin comes in, and all in all, it's my least favorite part.
Also, horses have feathers? Next you'll be telling you saw a house fly..." He had replied with a smile, quoting the ancient joke between them, in mostly the same tone. He was calming down, though, and he sounded a little less nervous...and probably not as bitter as usual. It was true, you could never go home again-in his case, quite literally after what had happened when he left-but Mari always kept him in good spirits...one could ask why, but...
There were things you couldn't tell anyone, he knew-things you kept them to yourself.
Nyctophobia was what it was called-he had read it in a fancy medical journal from New York-it was a fancy word for being ascared of the dark. He was a grown man, but he couldn't get over it. It still got to him. Only Mari knew. He had never really told anyone, not even ma and pa. He didn't know if she understood the why, about the storm he had gotten lost in...the way it seemed the cold and dark had been a hungry, cruel thing-that nothing mattered, not love, or money, or being good or bad-since it was all going to be eaten up in the end. The shadow held sway over all, and life was a flickering candle.
Because, deep down, he was still afraid of dying...and death was all around him, crowding around the undersides of porches, pooling around buzzing electric lights, swarming outside of locked doors and windows. The Dark was death, and he didn't want to die. So he avoided it. The price of that avoidance was a crippling fear, one he paid reluctantly.
Gerome himself only knew these things on an instinctual level, he couldn't put it into words. It was why he lived like he did. Nothing mattered. Nothing was sacred. Nothing lasted. Might as well enjoy the lights before they go out for good, he would reason...nothing mattered...yet...
...yet, to him, his sister Mari did matter. When on the worst nights back when they had been kids, when the snow had begun howling and the branches began tap tap taping on the windows of their home with long splintery limbs...Mari had stayed up with him, sometimes read to him, other times just talked. She hadn't asked him why or pried, only knew he needed his big sister-so he wouldn't feel completely alone...and he had never forgotten those simple acts of kindness, or stopped treasuring those old memories. Even as he himself did bad things, for worse reasons-he had tried to not be cruel or unnecessarily selfish, trying being the operative word. He had tried to remember he hadn't always been alone, and the world wasn't so dark there wasn't any hope at all. He had tried, and that was enough.
These were the things Gerome couldn't tell anyone.