[open] loneliness has always been with me, any

[astra]

It is the burning she remembers most vividly.
How it had felt like death, even before she was alive.

She dreams about it sometimes. How it had paralyzed her sometimes and other times it had spurred her into a frenzy. She had kicked and writhed and opened her mouth to scream but no sound ever came out.

And then she had tried to touch her mother once in the after. While her mother slept and she had come away burned again and the way she cried out had awoken her mother. How it had made her mother cry and her mother’s sorrow had become her own. Carved out all the space in her chest until she could barely breathe around it.

When she had begun to cry, too, her mother had thought it was the pain that made her cry.

She feels everything, the child. Even things she doesn’t want to feel.
She feels their grief and their anger and their boundless happiness.
Sometimes she wonders which things are hers.

Her mother lingers in the meadow now. Astra can taste her mother’s hope like it has sprung from her own chest. And she almost asks what they are waiting for, but she doesn’t want her mother to be sad again, so she doesn’t.

She just wanders as far as her mother will allow, which isn’t all that far. Because there is something different about them but she never says what it is. Sometimes she can feel a sharp spike of her mother’s fear for no reason at all. Guilt, too. Remorse so potent that sometimes she thinks she’ll choke on it.

She is drawn now by something she has never felt before. She cannot determine if it is good or bad. If she should be scared or relieved. If she even knows how to be any of these things on her own.

“Hello?” she calls into the shadows at the edge of the forest, squinting into the darkness.

maybe we were meant to be lonely

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