"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
11-11-2015, 02:29 PM (This post was last modified: 11-11-2015, 02:32 PM by Spyndle.)
If she were made of moments and not atoms, she would be a beautiful kaleidoscope of all the pretty things they never said, and all of the times they were too afraid. If she were made of moments and not atoms, then her eyes would reflect the rivers and the sunsets, and her skin would burn in all the places they once touched. She would burn like galaxies burn, all fractured light and tangled stars, and the moments instead of atoms would string together a constellation that always drew out the lines of herface.
Because loving Cordis made her beautiful then.
“I think this will consume us,” she had said once, and it had. It dissolved them like acid. It stripped away the fat and the flesh. It ate up the moments that made them and turned them into bones and atoms. It consumed them. It ruined them. And it was her fault.
She should have staid gone.
She should have melted into those last few sunsets like wax into a candle. She should have lain between the petals in floral wallpapers, should have become a single star amongst a constellation - because she belongs in backgrounds. She should have staid gone – because she does not belong with the living, because she belongs among the murals, because she belongs in the skies, and along the edges of rivers. She belongs in the peripheral.
‘Because you cannot hurt anyone from the outer edges.’
She should have staid gone.
She should have.
But she has never done what she should do.
So, she walks into the meadow that has become a graveyard of sorts, because how do you turn your back on something that once made you feel alive? Because Cordis loved her like something that mattered. She loved her like artwork; she looked, and she touched, and she never thought about wallpaper or wax or backgrounds. Because.
If she were made of moments and not atoms this might have killed her.
Atoms live even if you don’t want too.
Atoms live even if your heart does not.
11-11-2015, 04:05 PM (This post was last modified: 01-04-2020, 06:04 PM by Cassi.)
Gaze too long into the abyss and the abyss also gazes back into you, and perhaps that’s what had happened.
She had not always been a monster – had she? – but she’s long stared into the abyss, looking—
Looking for a way out of His lair, a crack in the wall, a lapse in attention.
Looking for the hounds, hot at her heels, chuffing breaths hot and filthy.
Looking back, for one more glimpse of the impossible gold woman who comes and goes but is always a constant in her mind, in her heart.
Gaze too long into the abyss and the abyss also gazes back into you, and Cordis had long stared into the abyss because sometimes the nothingness took the shape of Spyndle’s face, so she stared forth like there were answers there.
I can’t, Spyndle had told her when she left (again), and she had been right to. Can’t was an incantation of theirs, the first and last words, and in between them were some of worst and sweetest memories Cordis has ever known.
I can’t, she had said, but they were often liars, even if they had no intention of being so.
(I won’t hurt the boy, Cordis had told herself, drawing him close, lightning in her heart.)
She is a shell, built of virulent parts and pestilence, but she is harder, too.
The woman who once ran scared, whose heart danced a jitterbug in her chest, she is gone. She is gone because every terrible thing that woman feared has transpired.
She’s lost her daughter. She’s lost her.
And in the spaces they left grows lightning, grows a pleasure for burning.
In the spaces they left grows a dark heart, a creature perhaps forged in His lair – a nascent magician who wraps herself in lightning, wears it like a barbed wire fence around her.
She is, for the first time, untouchable.
Terrible then, that fate creeps in, the abyss gazes back.
Terrible, then, that a woman so untouchable sees the one thing she longs to touch.
“You,” she breathes – she can’t say her name because naming things gives them power, makes them real, “are you real?”
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)
The gleam of metal stops her, just as it always has.
And she hates herself for looking. She hates herself for needing to know, because she is the one who walked away without looking back, the one who said those final words (I can’t, I can’t.), the one who ruined them over, and over, and over again. But the glint of silver hits her eyes and she blinks and turns her cheek to see, so quick it feels like instinct. Loving her has always felt like instinct. Like she is not in control of her own body. Like she knows that they are poisonous together, but cannot help the magnetism.
‘You,’ she says, and Spyndle feels her heart burning – it’s been so long since she’s heard melody in syllables.
‘Are you real?’
Is she?
It feels like time slows. It feels like dying, and she knows about dying. It feels like she can hear the static in the air around her face. It feels like she can smell every dewy blade of the sweet-grass they stand in. It feels like an opiate, like her heart is hammering against her chest so hard it threatens to break through her ribs, like her eyes are rolling back into her head and she can see nothing and somehow everything. It feels like dying.
It feels like seeing everything she has ever wanted for all of her existence – one last time.
Is she real?
How can she be real when she haunts this meadow, their memories, like a ghost? How can she be real when she feels invisible? How can she be real when she cut away the only parts that made her alive? But it hurts. It hurts, and that’s how she knows it can’t be death. It hurts, and that’s how she knows it must be real – that she is real. She hurts worse than spilt blood and innards. She hurts worse than a vivisection. She hurts worse than flesh and bone split open.
“No,” she answers at last, and she casts her dark eyes towards the horizon because lying is sometimes the only way out.
So much has changed.
When everything she ever feared had come to pass – her lover gone, her daughter in His lair, living the same fate she’d once known – they had taken her heart with them, left only dark and bitter parts of her. The cancer inside of her was permitted to metastasize, to grow and spread into thoughts.
(“Do you want to know a secret?” she’d asked the boy, who had been too young, and then she had burned him, torched him, because it felt good and because he was helpless.)
She dresses in lightning, now, holds sway over it. She knows how to make it sit on her skin and not burn her. She knows other things, too, promises of a power within her, depths unplumbed – she can strike birds from the sky, can turn living things to ice and snow.
She makes herself untouchable, decrees it in lightning and fire, in silver skin set flame.
Yet.
Yet she looks upon her with so much hurt and wonder that she forgets she is a cancer, forgets she is a thing untouchable.
She looks at her and every defense she has is breeched, just as it’s always been, just as it always will be.
She looks at her and sees memories, sees atoms, sees all the things that made them – every sunset and goodbye and a name so sweet on her lips it hurts to say it.
Will you come back for me, she’d asked once, when the lightning was still something strange and new, when the blood was wet on her knees.
‘No,’ says the woman, and Cordis recalls how she once made a woman look like Spyndle, had lied to herself. She wonders if it’s the magic, changing a stranger to gold, drawing ghosts from thin air.
Ah, but there is no magic so powerful that it makes her heart quake in this way, there is no magic so powerful as to recreate the precise scent of her skin.
Memory has never done her justice.
“You’re lying,” she says, but she says it idly – it’s nothing new, they are often liars.
They say goodbye, and they are lying.
They say I can’t, and they are lying.
“I did sometimes wonder if I made you up,” she confesses, “but I always knew my imagination wasn’t vast enough.”
She couldn’t have created this, couldn’t have made her – she cannot speak life into poetry, into sunsets.
“I’ve missed you,” she says, finally, and she has – but the spaces carved out in her absence have been filled with lightning and cancers, and she doesn’t know how the two will coexist.
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)
Here they are, with the tall grass that touches their bellies, with the sunsets and the rivers and the hazels all behind them. Here they are, weak in the knees, still not able to look each other in the eyes because the beauty is overwhelming. Here they are, years from then, and Cordis still reminds her of mermaids. Here they are, years from then, and she still reminds her of beacons, of lightning. Here they are, years from then, and she still reminds her of all the things she once held close to her breast, of all the things that she once held.
So much of them is still exactly the same.
Spyndle has loved her for so long, but she still feels so much bigger than everything else. Cordis still feels ethereal – like she is made up of ghosts, of dreams, of diamonds. Spyndle has loved her for so long, and yet her dark eyes can still strip her down and leave her bare with only all the seconds it takes in a glance. She has loved her for so long, and yet she can still feel so small beside her hip-to-hip and cheek-to-cheek. She has loved her for so long, but she still feels like nothing in comparison.
“You’re lying,” she says, and Spyndle holds her tongue between her teeth and wonders if she will ever love anything more than the lines of her face, than the lyrics in her syllables. A piece of her clings to the hope that she will – the hope that this is only the beginning. A piece of her hopes with everything she has left that this is only the beginning; the cave on the side of the mountain that made her sprout wings. There is a piece of her that hopes this is right because it isn’t howling winds or frostbite. There is a piece of her that hopes, because reality means devastation – because reality means that a life without her might kill everything else.
And here is the thing – she has an image in her mind of all the things that they could have been if they had both made different choices – but that image doesn’t erase the things that they said, the things that they did, and the things they always wanted to do but didn’t have the courage for. She believes in a world where they exist, but it cannot be this one. She believes in a time where they exist, but it isn’t this one. She believes, but just barely.
There is a fire in the sunset, and it falls across their backs. The grass holds their hips, the river laps at their heels, and the branches of the hazel tree press against their ribs. So much of what they are is different, but so much is still the same. She still draws out the lines of her face and sees eternity. She still looks at her and feels whole instead of fragmented. She knows that they are not right – she has to know it – but it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t feel right. If they were everything left living she could not be home to so much doubt.
“Let me go,” she says, chokes without listening, and if there were any tears left inside her body she might have wet her cheeks and lost them now.
“Please, let me go.”
She’s dreamed of this and tried not to.
Because in the dreams, things work, planets align. They are not unstoppable force and immovable object both, they are simply lovers. In dreams, they meet and they stay together, and the magnetism that draws them near is not the very thing that repels them.
In dreams, there is not lightning, no Him, no ‘I can’t.’
She’s dreamed of this and tried not to because dreams turn to easy to nightmares, where she is stained in her blood, whispering come back, come back for me, but it’s not enough. She is not enough. In nightmares, where there is a turned back and a heavy weight of impossibility, where she wakes haunted by her eyes.
She wants to tell her things, every wonderful and horrible thing that’s happened to her. She wants nothing hidden, and what’s hidden now is the way she hurt the boy, the way it felt good to hurt him.
(“Do you want to know a secret?”)
Please let me go, she says, and it hurts her heart to hear it. She should. She knows this, the way she knew it every time – walk away. Do not look back.
Ah, but they are so often liars.
“Please,” she says, but doesn’t know what she’s asking for. Too much and nothing at all.
Another moment, another breath to take her in, to have this moment, this memory.
She touches her muzzle to Spyndle, down her neck. She is reverent, she is shaking, and the lightning that encased her is gone, she is simply silver again, like she was when they had first met. As if they could go back.
Ah, but there is no going back, no looking back.
“I hurt someone,” she confesses, because she needs to tell her, “and it felt right.”
Hurt people hurt people, the saying goes, but it had been more than that. The boy had been a catalyst, an affirmation that it was a pleasure to burn, he had soaked up her lightning and pain and for a moment there had been peace, before horror marched in to lay claim as she gazed at the boy’s ruined skin.
She is still touching her because she has touched her so rarely, she is like an artifact unearthed, and part of her worries that Spyndle will shatter beneath her.
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)
There are the things that she’s slaughtered and buried – the bones of secrets that she cannot bring herself to spill, the secrets she holds in the crook of her throat because she’s spilled too much already. There are a thousand things that she has wanted even just in the span of minutes that she’s found Cordis again, but wanting, wanting eats her up. Wanting leaves her eviscerated, wanting leaves her split from neck to belly (and she has spilled too much already). Wanting leaves her empty. Wanting is never free.
Wanting splits her into halves, and sometimes even now she can still feel the half that she has left (the girl she was once when wanting things didn’t feel like an infection), and that girl is always crying – that girl has flowers in her hair and her hands that she brings every day, as though the girl that she is now is lain out beneath a white-cross marker, six feet deep. Wanting can be lethal. Wanting can ruin.
“Please, let me go.” She said, but would it matter?
If she said: “Okay.”
If she said: “I’ll leave you alone.”
If she said: “I won’t keep you.”
Would it change anything? She would still want. She would still harbor those secrets in her throat. She would still know that they are bound to one another like the moon and the tide, or the earth and its orbit – like bones to graves. “I hurt someone,” Cordis says, and she can see a thousand faces that must reflect in the darkest fractures of her eyes. Cordis has hurt so many ‘someone’s. They both have. Her own hands are not cleaner – there’s blood beneath her nails, too.
It’s what happens when you let yourself want.
There would be fire on her tongue, but they are skin-to-skin and flesh-to-flesh, and so she swallows it. She swallows the burning words like she swallows secrets. She wonders if she’s breathing still, because she’s trying to hard not to unravel that it feels as though she’s forgotten how her lungs work. She should move away, but she can’t. She should do so many things, but she can’t.
“You’re hurting me,” she says at last, because wanting eats her like a plague from the inside out.
When she tries to think about them (and she often does), it is too much. It is overwhelming, to ponder what she’s done, what has been done to her. That somewhere in between every riverbank and hazel branch they created something, a kind of sickening romance – love, but more than that.
What they have consumes like a wildfire, leaves them blackened and burnt.
What they have is a virus, destroying them from the inside out until their bones rattle to dust.
What they have spawned silver girls and a boy who trespasses in time and space, creations who – like their parents – should not exist.
They are quantum physics – strange and unnerving and indescribable.
If she saw her every day for the rest of her life she would not forget this moment, a woman returned after being gone far too long.
If she saw her every day for the rest of her life she would go mad from the beauty of it, the way people’s lungs collapse and bend when they ascend from the depths too quickly, raptures of the deep.
If she saw her every day for the rest of her life she would still be on her knees at heaven’s gates begging for one more day, one more moment.
You’re hurting me.
The words jolt her from the reverie she’s in. She recoils as if burnt, thinking the lightning came back. But there is nothing. Her magic is not on her skin now, it remains in the marrow.
She wouldn’t hurt her.
Would she?
“I’m sorry,” she says. She is. She isn’t. She doesn’t know anymore.
“Perse is alive, Spyndle,” she says. She’d felt the link in the boy, his memories of speaking with their daughter, now grown (still the dead spit of Cordis, but scarless, save for a mark on her crest, a mark that turned her stomach).
“She saved herself.”
‘Like we couldn’t do,’ she does not add.
(Little does she know Perse loved every moment, loves Him, even.)
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)
Violet and violent, they should show on her skin, all of the bruises and the jagged ruptures of festering wounds that crawl across her insides like trails on maps.
She should be ugly with injury, not gold but red, and behind her she should drag bloodied, severed tendons instead of just regret – because it hurts, because it aches wanting something so untouchable so badly and knowing it will ruin you, because it should show like fractured bones, like infection. It feels like infection.
She should be huddled and shivering, more scabs than skin, all jutting hips and angled bones wound taut by a canopy of dying skin. The lines of her face should be hard; they should hide her youth behind accumulated layers of wrong decisions. She should become home to crooked lines that will wind red through her extremities and along the edges of her veins – because she is an addict, because she cannot quit, because here they are, again and again, cheek-to-cheek, over and over.
Because here they will be, again and again, cheek-to-cheek, over and over, until one of them is dead.
Because they love like addicts love fixes.
Because they love like heroin.
Because again and again they say goodbye, and again and again neither moves to leave. She will not leave. She cannot leave. Her legs are lead and stuck fast. Her legs are anchors. Her legs are ancient trees with roots dug deep. Cordis moves first (“I’m sorry,” she says, like it’s enough – it almost is, but Spyndle cannot bring herself to say so), and her own cheek moves to follow.
Gravity.
Addiction.
And she should drink the cadence of her voice like wine; it could be warm in her throat, could heat her to her bones, if she would let it. She almost does. She almost closes her eyes against the tops of her cheeks and remembers to breathe. She almost wavers, teetering under the weight of her once lovers lips. She almost does. She almost melts against her skin like a candle into wax. But she cannot let herself.
“Perse is alive, Spyndle.”
And instead another moment finds her.
Instead, there is this second moment where she finds her footing and her nerve. Instead, she finds the fire and the spit. Instead, she finds the cold sweats, and the fever. Instead, she finds withdrawal.
“Is she alive? Is she alive, Cordis?”
The sentences are questions, but the words themselves are thick and sweet like honey – too heavy, too artificial. And then there is this smile, a smile that could never belong on her lips (lips that have never said “no”, lips that have never moved to bite the hand that feeds). And this sick, slanted smile looks painful and wonderful all at once, and she says: “As alive as you are? Alive, but just barely. Alive, but afraid of the shadows. Is she alive like that?”
And the skies are too dark now. There are flashes here and there as the lightening splits the clouds in halves. She should stop. She should let the noise drown out the fire she is breathing, but for so long she’s said nothing while her eyes screamed. For so long her eyes have been the loudest part of her.
“Because if that’s your definition of life, then I hope she has died. I hope He has finished with her what he never could with you, because this life is worse.””
She doesn’t mean to say the words aloud, but they’ve eaten away at the darkest pieces of her insides. The words have gnawed on her like a rat through the walls of a burning house, and they find light at last. The desperation sickens her instantly, but she had wanted the world for the children they made. She had wanted them to know sunsets and rivers, but stars and mountains, too. She had wanted them to touch the wildflowers with their lips. She had wanted them to be whole, and not left in fragments. She had wanted them to never see the colours of bruises, violet and violent. She had wanted them. She didn’t want them in fragments. She didn’t want them in shards.
“You are not living. You are not alive. You were forgotten in the in-between – and I should have left you there.”
There is a reason love stories end at the confessions, and do not follow them any further.
Because it’s ugly, what comes after fate throws them together again and again, as the stars align and shine down.
(It shouldn’t be ugly. It should be tender. Shouldn’t it?)
But love is a living thing, a beastly thing, and it consumes them both in different ways. It is the reason Cordis lives still, wraps herself in lightning like a queen.
It nourishes her.
It destroys her.
She is riddled with cancers – her own darkness and this love, this pervasive thing she cannot shake. She is riddled with desires – to destroy cities, to touch her.
(There are faces that launch a thousand ships and then there is Spyndle. Cordis would burn universes for her.)
There is a reason love stories end.
Because the tenderness is not sustainable, not with women who are lightning-struck and wolf-bit, not when her heart beats too fast at this, all of this.
They should be rejoicing at the news of their daughter’s survival, instead, venom is spat out and hisses like acid at her feet.
She can’t help but laugh.
It’s cruel and she knows it – they are both cruel, in a way – but it’s impossible to stop.
“I’ve changed,” she says softly, dangerously. It’s almost the voice that told the boy, ‘come closer.’
She is not afraid anymore. Not when every wretched thing imaginable has come to pass.
(Including seeing her again, for now the things she worked to lie to rest rise and dance again, these things like desire, the urge to give her everything she wouldn’t take.)
“I’m magic,” she says. It’s the first time she’s said it out loud. She still isn’t sure she believes it, but –
But she has struck them dead with lightning.
But she has breathed underwater.
But she breathed her back to life once, said will you, will you come back for me.
But she has a crow who sometimes circles overhead, a gift from a raven queen, a crow made of lightning and feathers.
She is something, and it is powerful.
“You can’t see it,” she muses, almost to herself, and the lighting returns as she steps away, encasing her until she crackles and the static is near deafening.
“You can’t see it, but I’m glad I survived.”
(Is she?)
“I wish I could say the same for you.”
A lie (she thinks), one that aches to say, but she burns too bright to consider it long.
“I love you,” she says, and she means it.
She also means goodbye.
(There is a reason love stories end.)
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)
