come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you
She is as much a ghost as the memory of the man that lives inside her thoughts, as empty as the hole he left carved out of the pulp of her broken heart. There is no place that feels like home, because home had become the touch of his lips and the way it had felt to be loved by him. So she drifts through different places with different memories, letting each one wound her because at least in these wounds the past feels nearer. Feels close enough that if she just closes her eyes and drift to the dark, she could disappear inside them once more.
He would probably think her a stranger now, probably not recognize this dark that brews inside her chest and leaves her empty and lost beneath the stars, beneath a sky that feels too big and too deep when once she had thought it so beautiful. But now she looks up and wonders why gravity even holds her here, why she doesn’t simply come untethered and fall away into a never ending doom of cold dark stars.
Maybe she would be happy there with nothing that lives inside her chest.
But she is already so lost to a darkness of her own making that she doesn’t even notice the boy, or that muscle memory has her walking along the border of Taiga and Sylva. One the home of her parents, the other the place her heart broke for the very first time. Still, that pain seems dull compared to the rest. Stillwater was never hers, though she’ll always love him and the moments they spent together.
She blinks at an odd sound that tries so hard to pull her from her quiet reverie, taking several stumbling seconds to recognize that the sound is a voice and the voice belongs to a boy who watches her in a way that reminds her of someone she loves. Of her Merry. Though, physically they are truly so opposite, one all dark and shadow, and this boy bright like the reflection of sunshine trapped in copper ore. She frowns, because it seems that’s all she remembers how to do anymore, and then frowns again because she wishes she hadn’t.
“This isn’t solitude.” She says finally, and her voice is so quiet and a little chaffed from so little use, and all the starlight has faded from it. He might be confused by her answer since by all definitions this is solitude. A woman alone in a forest. But it is only because he cannot see the ghosts that stand with her. “It’s harder to find than it used to be.” She drifts closer, and she isn’t sure why, because others always ask too many questions and make her bring these old agonies to life again. But there is something so gentle in the way he watches her, like he knows she is fragile and so close to shattering apart. Or that she already has and now he has to be careful not to crush all the pieces scattered about.
“Should I want you to go?” Her voice is still so quiet, but something about his gentleness gentles her too.
even though i try not to
