01-14-2016, 12:37 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-18-2016, 01:55 PM by Dianna.)
How strange it is to be haunted by someone still alive.
How strange it is to live a life so different than her dreams.
So different than her reality.
At least, as it was, just months (has it already been months?) ago.
This was not the life she was supposed to live.
She still can hear the strong cadence of his chuckle, and the smile it brought to her lips each time he laughed.
She still can feel the tender touch of his embrace, a joyous blanket of love and warmth that she held oh so close.
She still can smell the aroma of his dark coat, so virile and faintly pungent (what boy doesn’t reek, after all?).
She recalls them all fondly. She recalls them bitterly.
She is still affectionate; she is vengeful.
She wishes the best for his future; she hopes he suffers, that he aches with an agony a thousand-fold what he gifted her.
And so she runs.
She runs, for days… for weeks… for months… She runs through forests and jungles and deserts and beaches and plains and bayous and mountains, and still she runs. She runs with no objective, with no destination, but to forget him. She runs from him.
She wants to remember him. But she wants to forget. She needs to forget.
And slowly, she does. She is still numb (a woman’s heart can never fully heal), but his image grows hazier and the pain grows fainter. She still recalls the love, but the memory becomes more and more like a dream. Did it even happen? Was it even real? It was, but it isn’t. Not anymore.
This is, she realizes, her new normal.
And how fitting it is that her realization arises as she skids suddenly to a halt, an iron maiden silhouetted against a blood red sky. For what is a sunrise if not a rebirth? And what is Beqanna, if not the land of the sunrise?
chalmette SHE EXHALES VANILLA LACE
‘And stars, in their orbits, shone pale, thro' the light
Of the brighter, cold moon, 'mid planets her slaves
Herself in the Heavens, her beam on the waves.’
Everything bows to it. Everything weathers under it.
She brings everything to the ground, in in the end, the Mother does.
But until that day, there is resiliency in everything she fashions. Out of flesh or bark or thick exoskeleton. They are made to move onward; their hearts and minds are impossibly elastic. They are meant to seek constantly. Ceaselessly.
She had surrendered to this wander full-throatedly as a young woman. Experiencing the machinations and travails of nature as she thought they were meant to be. She had loved, untried and messy. She had laboured, equally as unproven, as cold rain met her heated hips and thighs. She had learned all she could, of the seasons and the seeds.
She had not been running from anything. Not truly. It had felt a bit like it at the time, as if she were rebelling. When he left her life, his moonlit touches and starry laughter, she had caught the blow in her gut and held it there to remind her. Remind her of him, of course (though she has a much more solid token of their tryst to rely on for that), and of the slings and arrows of life. Nature is not kind. Not always.
It had taken time to shake loose the threads of wanderlust that divided her mind and path. (She does not believe in fate, or predestination; but she was meant to be dirtied by the jungle at least once more in her lifetime. She owed it to herself, and her mother. For how long? She can only say that she is content and galvanized, in ways that she has never been before.) Her life has never been sorrowful, only in flux. The times she spent in the Gates were growing pains. Beautiful and needed, but transitory.
The rosy mare watches a young, lean rabbit nibble at grass around the stalks of clustered, yellow agrimony. Every now and then, the animal stands on its hind feet and looks towards her, sniffing the air. It stays near, and when it disappears behind a shrub or into a patch of tall brome, she whinnies out and it lopes back, reprimanded. Long, early shadows spread between the glint of dew; the chorus of thrills and waking wings fill the forest border. She can concede to this only when it is quiet, as it is, because she cannot ask the rabbit to reject her duality anymore than she can ask the sun to abate its ascent.
The mare moves towards the animal, she drops her head and lips its forehead playfully, ruffling its long ears. Its nose wriggles, as it always does, and it sqirms from her and hops away, then leaps and twists its body in air heedlessly. She has seen this before, in the wild population, but she couldn’t know for sure what it meant until she had been told: excitement and joy. She laughs and shakes her head. Then the hushed scrape of hooves on firm soil catches her in surprise and she wonders in a moment of panic whether or not to lash out in defense of her young.
But the rabbit is gone, and a buckskin filly touches her mother’s ribs, her tail, like that of a rabbit, held upright. Vineine breathes in, but her lungs just ache for more as she turns to see what had spooked her so.
A mare, dark grey. She crosses the meadow, dotted with asters and bearberries and young sun, giving herself a comfortable breadth and smiles. She smiles as natural as the wildflower heads follow the sun. “Hello. I’m Vineine. From the Amazons.” She tilts her head, those observant gold-brown eyes keeping soft in their probe for information. She is windblown, and there is a restlessness in the crooks of her well-traveled body. Or maybe, it is restlessness grown weary.
magic-borne daughter of Prague and Elladora
- amazonian and mother -
She sees the other mare before she hears her arrival. Abnormal and terrible for a horse, no doubt, but an unfortunate consequence of ignoring essentially all sounds during her run. She had run past so many others – horses, deer, creeks, waterfalls – that nothing caught her attention in the second before she’d breeze pass. Rather, she had found herself ignoring everything but the repetitive rhythm of her hoof beats, a stable pulse in an unstable life. It was steady, constant… and now non-existent since she had stopped.
Instead, she hears the voice of the other mare. She seems amicable, or so the iron mare thought? It was hard to tell – she hadn’t heard the voice of another in so long, and the last few conversations she did have… well, they were far less than cordial. But the smile on the rose grey’s lips are difficult to misread, and so, quickly, Chalmette determines that she – Vineine – means no harm.
But that was what she thought of him once as well.
She blinks. She’s being ridiculous. There is no need to project his cruelty onto someone so innocent and friendly. She was once a fun, friendly girl too! Even a bit of a flirt, as he accused her once. She can do that again (the fun, friendly part). She knows she can. Or at least hopes she remembers how.
She inhales deeply, buying herself a second to pep talk herself into sanity under the ruse of catching her breath. And then she draws the biggest smile she could find onto her lips as well, hoping it would seem neither too large and forced nor too imperceptible and cold.
“Hi Vineine,” she manages, hearing her own voice for the first time in months. “I’m Chalmette.” She then pauses, trying to discern how to respond to the rose mare’s second statement. She feels like the Amazons are a location? Or a group, perhaps? But to be frank, she hadn’t a clue, and she could feel an embarrassed blush coming along.
“I’m sorry…” she begins, her smile growing more sheepish but less forced. “What are the Amazons?” chalmette SHE EXHALES VANILLA LACE
(No need to be sorry! Open to anything and everything!  )
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