12-12-2015, 11:00 PM
marvel
of being intimate with brokenness
Marvel.
There are shivers racing across the mottled blue valleys of my quivering skin. Two hundred and five bones reduced to little more than dust and ash in the wake of that wing-brush soft voice. Time unravels like a night sky, each memory a star twinkling like a hole in the ceiling of my impossibly small world. Some memories have gone, disappeared like shooting stars, and there are others still that I cannot reach no matter how hard I try. But in the ones I still have, the memories that are still mine, no one has ever said my name before. I am sure of this.
“Say it again.” I whisper and I am tripping over the words, turning in time to fall over the edges of her bottomless pink eyes. It is just a name, just a word with a meaning that I am too small to fit into, and I don’t know why it suddenly feels like there are pinprick holes in my lungs and I cannot catch my breath. “Please.” I say again in a voice as brittle and fragile as that traitorous heart thumping in my chest.
And then-
“I am not.” I say, and obligation sits like a pressure in my chest, an impossible pain that I cannot ignore. I am not a marvel, not marvelous. There is nothing wondrous about me, nothing inspiring about the place I come from – a forgotten orphan, plain and unloved. It feels important that she understands this, important because I will not survive the wedge of disappoint that will fall between us when she learns the truth.
But then she is stepping closer, closer, closer, and it takes three tries to swallow the uncertainty caught in my throat. There are two hundred and five bones pressed against my side and I am terrified of breaking every single one of them. She feels so fragile against my skin, like a dandelion puff crashed against the rocks. “Are you cold?” I whisper because I am too afraid to breathe with her face pressed against my shoulder, because I cannot understand why she would ever want to touch me.
And when her voice comes next tickling my ears like sunshine after a long, dark winter, I realize I do not need to know why. I only need to know that the sudden pain in my chest at the possibility of Adaline leaving is the worst pain I have known in my lonely life. “That is not what I want.” I tell her quietly in a voice that catches just a little when my dark eyes sink back into the reflection of her curled against my side.
This is what I want, Adaline.
on the surfaces of who I am