[private] everything that dies makes its way back, ryatah

[jarris]

i was ready to die for ya, baby
doesn’t mean i’m ready to stay

She says his name so easily that it arrests the heart in its ribbed cage. He feels it clench like a fist, the force of which kicks the air cleanly from his chest. 

Jarris.

And there is some small horror in being known, he finds. A kind of guilt shivers its way into the pit of his gut, coils like a serpent there, a thing ready to sink its teeth into the meat of him. (Had he forgotten her? No, he knows her face. He knows her face in a way that feels like it belongs to him. Or perhaps he belongs to it.) 

It is the familiarity that has him stricken, a kind of panic roiling in his chest at the thought that he knows her deeply, intimately, without knowing how. He remembers waking up here, finding Plumeria, and thinking her a ghost. But this is something altogether different. 

“Ryatah,” he echoes, though it comes out sounding like a question. There is no flicker of recognition in his mind, but that same nameless thing in his chest rises up in response, that same nameless thing knows. 

He, too, remembers the cold pelt of rain on the beach that day. But he remembers it as one might remember a dream or a thing that happened to someone else. It’s a suggestion more than a memory. He exhales long and slow and the gold pools at his feet, his legs are stained with it. 

“Why do I know you?” he asks, quiet, uncertain. And that nameless thing hammers against its ribbed cage, tells him that whatever useless life he has belongs to her. How loud the thing screams! But he does not understand whatever language it speaks. 

— Jarris