It feels like her ribs are migrating, like they’re each on tectonic plates that flee toward opposite poles. It feels like she’s coming apart, like her seams are unravelling, and when they do so her heart laughs at a newly risen opportunity to burrow down through her muscle and her flesh to make its final escape. These days it aches so much Eilidh is certain its pumping acid rather than blood, anyways. She wanders the meadow like a ghost might, lingering here and there at landmarks that stir memories still inside her - and it feels like sorrow.
It doesn’t feel like being home.
But she was born into the wildgrass, here, under the dappled shade of this ancient oak with the spring wind chilling her back. And she first found her legs by the river, there, when Moselle had stepped away and Eilidh had first learned that gravity could also exist between souls. The meadow is the closest place to home she’s ever known, but it held darker secrets, too. Like the last time she saw it, when Carnage had taught her lessons in anatomy, because nothing he laid his hands on was ever clean.
Since that day Eilidh has existed in a thousand different settings, floating from place to place like a feather caught in a breeze; she never stayed long enough to settle and make a mark. She had never felt belonging like she’d felt next to Moselle. She was an alien to this world. She was an alien to this life. Unconsciously, perhaps she had decided that to never love anything was to never have it taken away.
She does want to move on, though.
It’s why she hasn’t left again, why she wanders the meadow now drowning in reminders, because she can’t help but taste the dirt in her mouth. And she can’t unsee the earth opening up and her mother being swallowed by it. Eilidh still remembers how her fragile bones had trembled with the effort, how slick her body was with cold and sweat, and how finally when she was finished and Moselle was buried there was no relief that swept in to reward her for her momentous struggle. It was just quiet. It was just empty. She can’t stop herself from thinking about the decay that would take place; how the flesh would rot from her cheekbone and eventually pull away from the bone, and how that same cheek she’d kissed a thousand times before, sweetly.
But she’s trying.
Her bones are just fragile, after all.
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Kahea]