“Tell me, Eilidh,”
Something inside of her ignites with the sound of her name on his lips, and her ears quiver gently as she lifts her thoughts once again from subterranean cities with starlit walkways (she will always find herself back here, wondering, won’t she?). For as often as she gives her name to strangers she’s never heard it repeated back outloud. As is only natural to Eilidh, she delves further inside of herself to comb her memories and siphon from them the last time.
Of course she ends up with her name spelled out across her tongue.
Of course she ends up at Moselle.
“Why are you still here?”
Maybe he means here, flat against the ground. Maybe he means here, in the meadow, being buried alive by leaves that drown the long grass in bright, red blood. Maybe he means here, on this earth, and there isnt enough time in the world that exists to tell him everything that he is asking of her, but with the warmth of the sun here on her skin, and a cloud of his breath there, smoking out into the sky, she wants to try.
“I wonder that myself, all the time.” She says into the grass.
“My mother, I suppose, is the all encompassing answer.”
Weeks from now she will look back to this day, dissecting every piece of it (the warm, dappled sunlight, the scattered red maple leaves, the way the earth smells mingled with the sweat off his body) as though she is a scientist, as though if she can pull it apart enough to understand she has some small chance in hell of weaving another day just like this one. Despite her introspection, despite her unwillingness to move, she is peaceful in these brisk, autumn moments.
As peaceful as she is capable of being, for now.
So she’ll turn it, looking for clues — looking for evidence that everything about this day and these feelings are real — and all she’ll do is ruin it, warp the memory as she turns it, again and again, by the heat of her hands.
“Everything is different, but it will always be the same,” she says to him, then, as he lays his body next to hers under the boughs of this red maple.
“What did you mean by that?”
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Set]