‘Atlantia,’ he says, and she looks for him by turning her cheek across the curve of her shoulders. She’s drawing ripples in the water that echo out beneath the tips of her glass wings, and behind her, a mountain peak is reaching out into the sky and threatening to pull it into everything else – until snow, and rock, and water, and girl are all one.
‘Atlantia,’ he says.
And it’s so dark then when her eyes first flutter open that she isn’t certain she isn’t still dreaming, but then the soft shadows of their bodies come to light around her. They are sleeping soundly in the yellowed mounds of fallen leaves with buckled knees and tangled limbs, and the only sound for miles is the gentle sigh of their chests as they heave with every hearty exhale. And for a long while she is still, blinking softly into the darkness as her eyes adjust. And for a long while she aligns her breathing with theirs, and feels their hearts beating in sync.
At last when she scrambles to her legs she is careful that the friction of her movement against the leaves doesn’t wake them. They wouldn’t want her to leave in the dead of night, but she must. They wouldn’t want her to leave in the dead of night, but she doesn’t have a choice.
Because she loves them, but she doesn’t know who she is without them.
Because she loves them, but there are things that she remembers that she knows she should not.
And those memories, they’re as fragile as the snow, and they drift around her by the thousands but are lost long before she can ever hold them in the palms of her hands for long enough to see just what they’re made of (what she’s made of). What choice does she have but to chase them? Because she remembers the lilac petals of a wildflower that doesn’t grow in the places that she knows, and she calls it waterleaf.Because once the sky was a gentle pink like the soft flush of pale skin, and she remembers the way the diffused light looked along the angles of his face.
Because she remembers that someone she’s never met once looked right through her skin like he knew exactly what she was made of.
They wouldn’t want her to leave, but maybe he would.
atlantia
this is a poem about
how you never get the kiss you want
when you want it;