If am lost, I am lost on purpose.
Perhaps it’s not that Alaska hasn’t thought anything terrible. Perhaps, instead, it’s that she simply has a looser concept of the word—her world painted in broad stokes of grey. She has never learned to grapple with the worlds of good and bad the way that so many of them have. She has never had to learn the gravity of consequences or the way that the world would judge your actions upon a scale as though there was only one way to measure it. Instead, she grew up wild and, mostly, alone.
She learned the way of nature that was messy and infinite and defied boundaries.
She learned the way death could be clean and could feed the next cycle of life.
She learned the merciful way to cut a throat and that you could feel joy and pride in it.
There are no ties to weigh her down and no relationships to complicate the perfectly simple way that she lives—and even the one she has brings her freedom in the same way that it brings him pain.
So she tilts her head at his disbelief and then rolls her ivory shoulders, the crimson of her unnaturally long mane ruffling slightly with the movement. “Just because you find it difficult to believe doesn’t make it any less true,” her silver voice points out, although there’s nothing cruel in it—nothing but the simple truth of it. Her lips pull slightly into a frown when he admits his own problem but it is fleeting.
“I don’t know, there are so many other things to think about.” She doesn’t realize just how different it is the way that she thinks—the endless wilderness of her mind, the uncaged potential, unsullied by the world and the politics and the hurt. “Why think something terrible when I could think of flying instead?”
