and I ran back to that hollow again
the moon was just a sliver back then
Perhaps the reason that she is drawn to broken things is because she herself often feels so broken. It doesn’t make sense, because at first glance she is healthy, strong, altogether average. She is medium of build (what happens, she supposes, when a large father and a slight mother come together), muddy brown with obsidian points, nondescript eyes, and a homely face. She is a once-Princess of a land of sand, where her parents reigned together through the gales and the storms and the draughts. She had parents who loved her and a land that should have called to her bones.
But she did not feel whole.
There were parts of her unfounded that ached with longing for things she did not understand. There were parts of her made sick by what should have made her well; parts of her that broke at points where they should have been the strongest. Her heart was swallowed by the constellations and flung up into the night sky, giving her an eternal sense of wanderlust—a feeling that she could walk for years and never gather herself up once more. Her very veins pumped starry-eyed wonder through her.
She was fractured and jagged on the edges and perhaps that is why the plain mare felt so at home next to the murderers and mad and sinister. So she smiles gently when he tries to explain the unexplainable, and she does not move from her spot by his side, just nodding so he knew that she was listening. “I don’t think that I will ever understand,” she confesses in the silence between words. “But I want to say that I do, because I feel like I could.” A soft, silvery laugh that drops off suddenly.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
And then: “My home doesn’t want me there.” It is the first time that she has ever voiced that single fear that has become a swollen monster in the back of her head—growing with time. “I don’t know why, but it doesn’t.” She wished it did, wished she could run amongst the dunes like she did as a child before this all took root—but she knows that is a hopeless wish. Looking at him, her expression grows hopeful. although she cannot help the sadness that creeps into the edges, “Perhaps we can find a place where you can be whole and I can be home. Wouldn't that be wonderful, Sleaze?”
and I ached for my heart like some tin man
when it came, oh, it beat and it boiled and it rang