"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
08-18-2019, 12:14 AM (This post was last modified: 08-18-2019, 11:49 PM by bethlehem.)
bethlehem
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago.
There is a memory that stirs someplace in the furthest recesses of his psyche.
He can feel it curl at its edges sometimes.
He can almost catch it in his teeth before it’s gone again.
Perhaps this is why he is so quick to agitate, because there is something that is always flitting just outside of his reach. Sometimes he think there must be a reason for it. A reason that, try as he might, he can never force the memory to the front of his mind, can never force it to take shape. Sometimes he grits his teeth and tries until the muscles tremble and his jaw aches and his chest heaves with all of the effort he pours into trying to remember.
Sometimes he does not dwell on it for months. In those months, he forgets it exists at all. His frustration lays coiled in the pit of his gut, dormant. Until he feels it stirring again.
He feels it now. He stands, poised on the edge of something, a vise tightened around his throat. He closes his eyes, as if this might help, funnels all of his effort into trying to drag it to the forefront. His bones ache with want. He sucks in a sharp breath, stubbornly ignoring the ache in his jaw and his joints. There is a sound that begins at the center of him, the very pit of his gut, gathers force and momentum as it claws its way up the long, parched column of his throat, culminates in some great, animal thing as it explodes out of his mouth and echoes in the trees around him.
Because, still, it remains just out of reach.
Foolish, he knows, to think there is any part of his unremarkable life worth remembering at all.
He opens his eyes then, casts a cursory glance into the shadows that slant toward him, and realizes with a start that he is not alone.
and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones ‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs
She can never outrun the ghosts that now haunt her.
And the worst part is knowing that she has no right to them. She was born to happy family and lived a happy life. She had two parents who adored her and her life should have been better. Should have been. Should have been. Instead, her life had crumbled when they fell apart, then back together, and then back again. Her life fell apart when she loved a boy who could never love her back.
It would be easy if she could just blame it on others. It would be easy if she could just point the finger and say that her life was so broken because of external reasons but she knew that the truth was that she had her own part in this. She knew she pushed others away and lashed out and became this twisted thing.
She was no longer the laughing, confident, joyful girl of her youth.
Her father had told her that they were monsters so a monster she became.
And it is the monster that stumbles across him today. She is raw with her grief and her self-loathing so when she nearly runs into him, she rears back only slightly and twists. Her body comes down hard and she takes a leap away before she spins around to face him. Her scales shine underneath the moonlight and her viperous eyes narrow as her lips pull back to reveal the fangs underneath.
“Why are you here?” she demands like she has a right to this place—like she could say that she deserved to be here more than this stranger with bruises in his eyes. But she doesn’t explain her demands and doesn’t try to explain herself. Instead she stands there, breathing hard, her forelock curling down her face.
adna
we're setting fire to our insides for fun collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home
08-18-2019, 12:35 AM (This post was last modified: 08-18-2019, 12:36 AM by bethlehem.)
bethlehem
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago.
He wonders, idly, if he should feel threatened.
If she bares her teeth to instill some sense of fear in him.
Or at least some semblance of trepidation.
But he looks at her and feels nothing beyond the rawness in his throat and the splintered edges of all that frustration that lives in him. He can feel it in the marrow of his fucking bones. So, he opens his eyes and she bares her teeth and demands an answer from him that he simply does not have and all he can think is, give me something worth remembering.
His nostrils flare and he casts a glance over his shoulder for no reason other than to afford himself the opportunity to try and force his thoughts into a pattern that makes sense. He swallows thickly and drags his focus back to her face – that dark face and the eyes that flash with some kind of warning he is perhaps too dumb or too plain or too otherwise ordinary to translate. You should be afraid, it says but he doesn’t have it in him.
He grits his own teeth but he does not gnash them. He merely shifts his weight and rolls one shoulder in a noncommittal short of shrug. Something wicked twists in the pit of his gut but it is not fear and it is not frustration. It is something dark and lonely and he narrows his gaze at her. “Where else would I be?” he asks then, as if it is really that simple. As if that had been the answer she was looking for when she’d asked it.
and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones ‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs
She wishes that he would have run or risen up to her throat and leave them twisted like a gnarled tree. She wishes she could lose herself in the chase or the fight or in the guilt of watching him flee before her. Instead he just looks away and then looks back, rolling his shoulder and almost dismissing her.
It makes something ugly rise in her.
Something that causes her to taste poison on her tongue.
Something that makes her nearly bite down until she severs it.
“Somewhere else,” she snaps, even though it’s nonsensical. She doesn’t even know him and she certainly doesn’t have any right to be saying that this stranger should be gone. She ignores the dark shadows that pass over his eyes and wishes that she hadn’t said anything; wishes that she’d just kept running.
Her scaled flesh shivers, twinging beneath the starlight, and she just stands sill underneath his question. There are a million answers that rise in her throat—some truthful and others complete fabrications—but she finds that she can’t give any of them a voice. They just writhe and then die. They just fade away.
Finally, she wrinkles her nose and then just throws out a quick answer.
“I don’t know where I belong.”
It’s the truth and it burns more than the toxins that seep from her fangs and she finds that she can’t meet his gaze. Her sage green eyes avert to the ground and she stares at it, frowning into the darkness.
adna
we're setting fire to our insides for fun collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home
bethlehem
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago.
Somewhere else, she says, and the smirk that follows is wry – or smug, though he never cared to learn the difference – and perhaps he might have laughed had they met anywhere else. Perhaps he would have been swayed to something other than the darkness that swells and bursts at the base of his throat. He can feel its ink-black fingers dip into the place where his heart ought to be.
There is some small part of him that wonders it is she’s so upset about. She had not been there when he’d screwed his eyes up tight and began to fumble for something he would never be able to reach. She had materialized somewhere in the interim, which perhaps technically meant that she was encroaching on his space and not the other way around.
“You’re probably not wrong,” he muses and the smirk remains, wayward and lopsided. And where does he belong? This bastard who’s never been able to stop his feet from moving, who has never stilled long enough to grow roots, who has never had any place to call home except for maybe the cold banks of the river.
The smirk slips at its edges in the wake of her answer. She delivers it so matter of factly that it nearly knocks the wind out of him. He can feel it close a fist around his lungs, squeeze the air out of them. He sucks in a sharp breath, the nostrils flaring as he considers her. As his gaze shifts along the scaled shoulder as it catches what little moonlight slants through the canopy overhead.
“That makes two of us, then,” he says and then he shrugs again.
and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones ‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs
She wishes she could say that looking at him was like looking at a mirror.
She wishes that she could say that she has a semblance of the nonchalant apathy that he wears so easily; she wishes that she could claim it and wear it like an armor. But despite the scales that coat her and the fangs she bears, she has always been a hideously vulnerable girl. She has always been so deeply aware of the hurt around her and the different ways that a heart can break and she has felt it all—felt it all.
So even though her face remains hard—nearly cruel—it does not look apathetic.
Even when he shrugs and gives her an answer that she can sink her teeth into. Instead she feels a strange kind of desire; something that wants to tear him apart to understand him. Does he know all the hurt that she does? Does he break along the same faultlines? Do the earthquakes cause the same tremors in him?
She has no right to ask these things, to demand them, but she has not cared for her rights. She has not bothered to understand her boundaries with this stranger and perhaps that makes it easier. Perhaps it makes it easier that she doesn’t know him and he doesn’t know her. Maybe in this moment she can find some sort of absolution in his presence or understanding or just a moment of peace from herself.
“Do you know if you’ll ever know?” and she hates the way that her words sound pained on the edges. She hates that she sounds so weak—that there is so clearly a bitterness curled around each and every syllable.
“Because I don’t know where to start looking, and I’m so tired of not knowing.”
adna
we're setting fire to our insides for fun collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
B E T H L E H E M then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago
The apathy has been cultivated over a lifetime of aloneness.
Not loneliness, per se.
Because the brief periods of loneliness have always been rectified easily enough.
The lonely are easy to find and they are so desperate for attention that they rarely ask much ofhim.
No, it is not loneliness that has made him this way but rather the better part of a lifetime spent in his own company. The fact that he has scarcely ever been made to care about anything at all. So he hasn’t. He has never known the hurt that she has known. As far as he knows, there is no faultline at the center of him. There is a darkness, though, a darkness that he has never fully examined or attempted to understand. These things, he knows, are sometimes better left alone.
She wears her darkness plainly.
In the way she bares her fanged teeth.
In the way she snaps at him.
In the bitterness that drips thick from her words.
He blinks at her, the smirk gone now. Not even a shadow of it remains as he studies her. The mouth is pressed into a thin, tight, contemplative line as he ruminates. Will he ever know?
“I don’t think I’ve been looking,” he admits. He has walked so many thousands of miles and in all those miles he’s covered in all the years he’s been walking, he’s never found a place that has made him want to stay. “I don’t think I want to know.” Not even he knows if this is the truth.
I wish I could take the hands of time and turn them in reverse I'd take back every long goodbye with venom in my words
“How do you do it?”
The words are out of her before she can stop them—before she could possibly ever put a stop to them. They are on her tongue and hanging in the air and she is left in the aftermath, feeling nothing but the way that the air stings and her lungs hurt as she tries to keep breathing. She wishes she could take him apart so that she could study him. She wishes that she could map out his veins and find an answer in them.
She knows that she will need to explain the question soon but she struggles to give breath to it. She knows that he won’t understand the question and she isn’t sure that she does either. She just knows that she feels nothing but it takes shape in her lungs, inflating until her throat feels swollen and her tongue warped.
Finally, she lifts her sage green eyes, her thin chest still heaving as she tries to catch her breath.
“How do you not look?”
She swallows hard, her delicate face framed by the curls of her forelock, the mane that sticks to her scaled neck. “I just…” she breaks off but doesn’t tear her aways from him. There’s something to be learned in this moment, she thinks, but she doesn’t know what it is. She doesn’t know what to say anymore.
“I need to stop looking,” she confesses and it’s almost a relief to say it.
“I keep looking and I keep being disappointed. I need to stop looking. I need that to be okay.”
the only way to be being found is getting lost at first but all I find are more bridges to burn
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
B E T H L E H E M then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago
She is bringing him face-to-face with questions he’s never wanted the answers to.
He swallows thickly.
She does not look away, but he does.
He looks away and he drags in a shaky breath. That dark thing that lives in the pit of his gut rears its ugly head and he thinks that he’d rather go back to the moment just after he’d opened his eyes and she’d spit her vitriol at him. And he’d had it in him to smirk.
Because there had been humor in it.
But there is no humor in this.
He can feel the vise tightening around his throat again. It is only a matter of time before it arrests the air in his lungs, he knows. Maybe this is why he looks away. Because to look her in the eye might mean that he will have no choice but to confront all of the things that have led him here. He will have to spend any amount of time considering the fact that he’d taken to walking in pursuit of something – not a home, certainly, but something.
He looks away because he is afraid, perhaps, that she might be able to see through him to the storm cloud brewing underneath. Because the darkness lives in him but he has never worn it well.
He has forgotten, by now, the sound that had ripped the rust out of his throat. The frustration that had swelled to near bursting at the very center of him. The rabid hopelessness that laid him to waste.
“After awhile, you’ll find that ‘home’ doesn’t mean anything at all,” he says. This is his truth laid bare. How he loathes the sight of it. It leaves a bitter aftertaste on his tongue long after he’s spoken the words out loud.
“In fact, you’ll find that there is precious little in this world that means anything at all.”
I wish I could take the hands of time and turn them in reverse I'd take back every long goodbye with venom in my words
The little snake girl who always wanted to be meaner than she is.
The snake girl who thought if she bit hard enough, her hurt would be misinterpreted as fury—her defenses some how mistaken as offense. But looking at him, she knows it’s futile. The venom that had so quickly spit from her lips dies and she’s left stripped bare. She’s naked and vulnerable before the shadows on his face. She’s young and foolish and she wishes that she somehow had some armor to protect herself.
His answer knocks the wind out of her and she wishes that it didn’t. She can’t recover quick enough to keep the shadows from her face or the anguish that so quickly twists her features into something ugly.
“My father drove my mother and I from our home when I was young,” she is saying before she can stop herself from the confession—the way the truth just bubbles up her throat. “My mother used to lie and tell me stories about why we lived by the river like I wouldn’t grow up to know the truth of it.”
It doesn’t matter that her father had come to find them eventually. Just like it doesn’t matter that her mother and father broke apart after that and then came together again. They were stuck in the tidal pull of their own love and didn’t see how each collision broke Adna a little more.
They didn’t see how it fractured her worldview.
“I saw my father later—over the corpse of a foal.”
Her face twists again. It’s the first time that she’s ever admitted this to anyone. “He looked up at me and told me he was hungry—and that I carry that in me too. He said ‘our survival spells someone’s doom.’” She laughs and the sound is bitter on her tongue. “Of course, he didn’t know my name at the time.”
She swallows hard again.
“I don’t think anything in this world is precious. Not any more.”
the only way to be being found is getting lost at first but all I find are more bridges to burn
