i'm a wreck. didn't you know?; nyxia

[Nyxia]

my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things

She wanders as if in a dream. With an idle look in her eye; with slow, slumberous steps that have no sense of direction about them at all. That will never change. She is too far-gone. She has seen too much – she has been touched, too often, by things too far removed from reality, life, wakefulness and normalcy. Her companions are ghost-things – escapees from worlds that exist on different plains than this one.

They are air-fleshed and wind-voiced.

At one time or another (or, in no Time at all), she met them on their own ‘soil’ – dream-land or in-between. They had been dagger-clawed and flute-tongued and pastel-feathered! They had been bright, jocund and beautiful; they had been pernicious, suspicious and sad. They could, and did, touch her, speak to her, whisper amongst each other about her. She wonders what she must have looked like in their universes – like an alien, perhaps, like a thing that does not belong – air-fleshed and wind-voiced?

She has come to accept that this place, beautiful indeed, is real. Though the lines are blurred in a permanent sort of way, forever teasing the edges of some rift or another – or so it seems, as each step she feels cold and then hot and then cold again, her skin recalling the slippage between worlds on loop. But when she stops, as she does now her right eye blinking at the endless sea of yellow grass, the sun (the real one – whatever that means, though she can tell it is young and strong because she has met old, frail ones and has been to places without) touches her, and in that embrace she feels moored.

From afar, she watches him consider the birds. She has never done this, but in response she tilts her head and looks skyward, watching their dark figures hem the planet. She wonders none of the things he does – they do not elicit anything but a blink or two before returning her watery gaze to him. (They might have, once, when she was a girl and her mind was not fractured as it is today.) 

When he wades through the grass, lifting the softest song of rustling and muffled footsteps below, she does not curl and quake in fear – (she might, if she knew what he could be, but she does not and it means nothing for now) – she turns her head right, so that he comes to her clearly, not in the blind spot that is the cratered and puckered left. 

“Tannor?” she inquires, her voice as steady as when she was a girl, not the weepy stammer that had become her timbre in recent years. “That’s it, right? Nyxia,” she supposes, after all of it, that is still true, “you suppose this place is real, right?” She yearns to reach out and touch him, as she touches and is touched by the grass around her, seeking more earthen ropes to grip onto.

More assurances that she has not fallen down a rabbit hole, again.

and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.