There are things that she wants, too.
There are the things that she’s slaughtered and buried – the bones of secrets that she cannot bring herself to spill, the secrets she holds in the crook of her throat because she’s spilled too much already. There are a thousand things that she has wanted even just in the span of minutes that she’s found Cordis again, but wanting, wanting eats her up. Wanting leaves her eviscerated, wanting leaves her split from neck to belly (and she has spilled too much already). Wanting leaves her empty. Wanting is never free.
Wanting splits her into halves, and sometimes even now she can still feel the half that she has left (the girl she was once when wanting things didn’t feel like an infection), and that girl is always crying – that girl has flowers in her hair and her hands that she brings every day, as though the girl that she is now is lain out beneath a white-cross marker, six feet deep. Wanting can be lethal. Wanting can ruin.
“Please, let me go.” She said, but would it matter?
If she said: “Okay.”
If she said: “I’ll leave you alone.”
If she said: “I won’t keep you.”
Would it change anything? She would still want. She would still harbor those secrets in her throat. She would still know that they are bound to one another like the moon and the tide, or the earth and its orbit – like bones to graves. “I hurt someone,” Cordis says, and she can see a thousand faces that must reflect in the darkest fractures of her eyes. Cordis has hurt so many ‘someone’s. They both have. Her own hands are not cleaner – there’s blood beneath her nails, too.
It’s what happens when you let yourself want.
There would be fire on her tongue, but they are skin-to-skin and flesh-to-flesh, and so she swallows it. She swallows the burning words like she swallows secrets. She wonders if she’s breathing still, because she’s trying to hard not to unravel that it feels as though she’s forgotten how her lungs work. She should move away, but she can’t. She should do so many things, but she can’t.
“You’re hurting me,” she says at last, because wanting eats her like a plague from the inside out.
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know