If she were made of moments and not atoms, this one might feel cancerous.
Once she lead her by the hand through white fog and into the lighthouse on the edge of the sea. Once she was a beacon, once she was the only light on a horizon of endless ocean. Once, Cordis asked her to come back, and she had been brave and looked death in the eyes and said, ‘no’. Once, lightning struck her flesh, and her bones. Once, lightning fed electricity into her heart, and it was enough. Would it be enough now? If she asked, could she tell everything else ‘no’? If she asked, would she come back?
‘I’ve changed,’ Cordis says.
They both have.
Because somewhere a wind is blowing, and it rattles the leaves of an old hazel bush that has not seen water in a long, long time. Somewhere, there are hazel leaves that pull away from the dried branches of a tree that was everything they ever needed until it wasn’t; they drift on the breeze to the depths of their graves, and they remember the things that they have seen, and then turn them to mulch. And somewhere, there is a river running dry, and rock shores that are so thirsty for the erosion that used to lap kindly at their hardest edges. Her edges are thirsty, too. She cannot remember the feel of rounded corners, of kindness, because everything about her is hard now.
‘You can’t see it,’ she says, and maybe she’s right – but maybe she isn’t, maybe the simple fact that they are not still skin-to-skin in these moments is enough to prove otherwise, that they resist, that they are not the same. Maybe they both see it. Maybe the gravity is not the same anymore. Maybe they have split atoms and worlds and skin, and both come out differently than they ever had thought possible. They’ve been broken and remade so many times that maybe the pieces don’t align anymore. Maybe this isn’t addiction. Maybe it isn’t withdrawal.
Maybe endings are just endings.
‘I love you,’ she says, but maybe it’s too late for consolations.
“I loved you once,” she says, because she is a volcano spewing ash and lava and resentment; she’ll rain clouds of it until they both suffocate under the weight of her choices and the bitterness all at once leaves her tongue.
And then she is alone.
This is still the kindest thing she has ever known.
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know
Perse please <3