She does not belong here.
She does not belong there, either. She belongs in the spaces in-between something and nothing. She did not know what home looked like until she saw her. She did not know what love felt like until her lips touched the soft patch of skin behind her neck. She looked like dreams looked, hazy on the edges. She looked like the lyrics of songs. She looked like galaxies, untouchable, unreachable.
Time was fleeting once.
And now every second without her feels twice as long.
Shadows crawl across her skin. They have gnarled and reaching fingers, because the ravens above her are stretching their black, feathered wings and forging the shapes of monsters along the plains of her back. And even with their gaping, sharp-toothed jaws, even with their irregular angles and monstrous deformities, even with all of the impossibilities they harbor along their edges – even with all of that, they are nothing compared to the monsters she has known. Monsters she has felt. Monsters she has loved.
She loved them until she drowned in the fissures of their irises. She loved them until they swallowed her whole. The world whispers softly now of the drums of war, but the only war she’s ever followed has lived and raged inside her heart.
He hits her cheek, and it isn’t the first time. The ache on her skin feels familiar. She wrote poetry for feelings less than this. It’s been so long since she’s known anyone else. It’s been so long that she’s walked only in circles that she’s forgotten what happens when you move straight.
‘Sorry. You okay?’
And if she were honest with herself her answer would be entirely different, but time made liars out of both of them. “Yes,’ she says instead, because she has to be okay, because to tell the truth now might split her atoms, because to tell the truth now might turn her bones to dust and she has watched enough of herself float away on the breeze.
“You should watch where you’re going,” she says, not because she’s malicious – because she means it, because she remembers closing her eyes once and wishing with everything inside of her that she hadn’t. Because monsters love the dark. Because monsters are made of the shadows that fall when your eyes close.
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know