leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped
It was a thing he discovered early, how soft he could make his edges.
How, if he concentrated hard enough, he could make himself not exist at all.
And he had delighted in hurtling at his sisters as fast as he could and passing right through them. How he had delighted in threatening to break the fragile things from the beginning.
There had been a glimmer of something else, too. A magic less obvious.
He caught glimpses of things he was too young to understand. But he had not asked about these things with shimmering edges that flitted just outside of his reach. These things that belonged to him but would not come to him.
He moves now with purpose. Away from the meadow and his sisters and his mother and the glass stallion who had fashioned water from thin air to entertain him once. Who had treated him as his own despite the glaringly obvious differences in them. They had never explicitly told him that he was not the glass stallion’s son, but they didn’t have to. Isakov was not glass like his sisters. He had galaxies trapped in his skin, certainly, but they had obviously inherited that from their mother. But he had never asked about his father either.
It is the river that beckons him now and he goes without question. He does not understand the pull, the fish-hook in his gut that draws him to the water’s edge. He feels no thirst as he sinks up to his knees. The draw is perhaps even more primal than that. But this, too, belongs to him but refuses to be brought into sharper focus.
A dream he had once, maybe.
He dips his head to skim his mouth against the water’s current. He can feel it in his veins, too.
