04-06-2022, 02:57 PM
i can’t stop you putting roots in my dreamland --
She has never really felt the weight of her naivety until this moment. She had thought herself empathetic before, had thought that she had a firm understanding that not everyone's life was like her own; that some endured hardships that she could never truly fathom, things that might make them bitter or hard or wary. But she has never found herself standing before someone where her words would be lacking, where the right thing to say is as slippery and elusive as trying to hold water. Anything that she says would ring empty, and anything she does would feel hollow, and even worse is knowing that she will leave him and continue her life virtually unaffected.
Or she would have, if she were built differently.
If she had been the kind made to forget and move on, and if he had not already begun to wear away a spot inside the cage of her ribs, this boy that no one could see.
“I wish I knew what to say,” she says, the words falling like wilted petals off a flower—melancholy and soft, nearly carried away by the breeze. “Or that I knew how to fix it,” and here her face pinches with worry and regret, because she cannot help him. She has only just met him but in the span of these few precious moments she has surmised that he did not deserve to be cursed like this, and yet she is powerless to change it.
He asks her if she wants to see him, and though there is more beneath the surface of the question she does not look that deep yet, and she answers without a moment of hesitation. “Of course I do,” but as she speaks the shadows that lurk come crawling out, a reminder of what to see him would mean, but she does not take the words back. And so she falls quiet, and in the quiet her mind hums with unspoken things, before finally she says softly, almost wistfully, “I suppose if that is meant to be, then it will happen.”
She has never really felt the weight of her naivety until this moment. She had thought herself empathetic before, had thought that she had a firm understanding that not everyone's life was like her own; that some endured hardships that she could never truly fathom, things that might make them bitter or hard or wary. But she has never found herself standing before someone where her words would be lacking, where the right thing to say is as slippery and elusive as trying to hold water. Anything that she says would ring empty, and anything she does would feel hollow, and even worse is knowing that she will leave him and continue her life virtually unaffected.
Or she would have, if she were built differently.
If she had been the kind made to forget and move on, and if he had not already begun to wear away a spot inside the cage of her ribs, this boy that no one could see.
“I wish I knew what to say,” she says, the words falling like wilted petals off a flower—melancholy and soft, nearly carried away by the breeze. “Or that I knew how to fix it,” and here her face pinches with worry and regret, because she cannot help him. She has only just met him but in the span of these few precious moments she has surmised that he did not deserve to be cursed like this, and yet she is powerless to change it.
He asks her if she wants to see him, and though there is more beneath the surface of the question she does not look that deep yet, and she answers without a moment of hesitation. “Of course I do,” but as she speaks the shadows that lurk come crawling out, a reminder of what to see him would mean, but she does not take the words back. And so she falls quiet, and in the quiet her mind hums with unspoken things, before finally she says softly, almost wistfully, “I suppose if that is meant to be, then it will happen.”
-- my house of stone, your ivy grows, and now i’m covered in you
allaire.
@arcturos