‘I’m less trapped with them closed,’ he says, speaking of his eyes.
She doesn’t know if he means to be poetic, but there is an ugly truth that she uncovers in that, about living life in a set of blinders. The fog buried her memories once. The fog let her live, but took everything in life away. She wants to tell him to remember. She wants to tell him that even if it’s miserable, it’s important. She wants to tell him about the fog, and about the way that lightening brought her back but not the same. She wants to spill out her truths like she’s spilled out every drop of blood, every organ, once.
But it’s her truth, and not his.
So, she casts her eyes towards the ground and exhales, and her truths float away in a cloud of vapor.
‘You should take care with where you’re going,’ he says, but what he doesn’t know is that the boundaries carved out by his politicians are flimsy and intangible compared to those that she has known. He doesn’t know that once she was a wild-thing. He doesn’t know that she’s seen so much worse than this. Because they loved like wildfires. They loved like they were made of gasoline. They loved beyond worlds, beyond living and dying, beyond wars and peace. They loved until they couldn’t, and there is nothing worse than that, and lines are just lines drawn by hand.
"I can’t," she begins to say, but she chokes on all of the letters so she catches herself and says instead: "I won’t." He might not hear her. Her voice sounds like an echo, because it rattles and reverberates off the walls of her throat until there is nothing left of it but a sigh that escapes through her parted lips.
‘Where are you trying to go?’ He asks, because he knows the shadows crawl across her skin and brand her an outsider. “Anywhere,” she answers, because before she read words off of Cordis like her skin was made of braille, because now she doesn’t speak the language the rest of them do. Because nothing makes sense without her, and it hurts, even if she wishes that it didn’t. Because she isn’t as acidic as her words pretended to be. Because she said ‘I loved you once,’ when she meant ‘I’ll love you, always.’
“Anywhere else.”
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know