Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, Heartworm/Irisa

[Nyxia]

my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things

The darkness is weighty. It feels like wet blankets over her eyes.

(Nyxia blinks – darkness begets darkness.)

She stands still for a while. For minutes and hours and days. Her head hurts. It is something she is holding on to. Something she is taking with her because she cannot figure out the extant knots that entangle her fingers and hold her back; it’s a vestige of a moment that she cannot make right, yet.

(It’s a jigsaw of skull, slipping past her outstretched fingers. These memories, like  so many bright things, cannot live here. Not in full, in this in between made for her and her alone, where she finds herself caught as if in a web. Where she exists and does not all at once, pulled apart by warring gravities – life,Father?; death, his gift to her; and something she cannot understand. Something that swirls and sweeps like a tide, searching for her.)

Father? She closes her golden eye, the other is shut by the swell of the bruised flesh around it.

When she opens, they are two, because here there are no vestiges of violence left bare. Bright light clouds her vision as darkness had before but she does not turn away from it. She breathes it in, sweet and warm, and takes a sure step on soft footing. It reminds her of her faraway cradle of moss and windflower. A breeze runs over her hips, a soft touch that she turns into and yearns to chase. She pirouettes in place, glancing up at the whirl of green and pastel wings. She turns and turns – bird songs, like woodwind instruments, meet the low chirp of bejewel insects – until she feels dizzy and giddy and stops on shaky legs, smiling.

And there they are.

(Father? A sticky part of her mind clings to it even in paradise.)

‘There’s no father here.’

(Her gut clenches.) “Oh,” she says softly, sinking back into her heels. “I…” (...know you.) She blinks, turning her golden eyes first to the woman and then the girl. (We once lay in a tangle together.) “I’m… Nyxia.” The girl’s brow wrinkles and despite the peace that stains every fabric of this place, she pulls her chin to her chest and a tear traces her cheek. (She is holding onto these, too.) But here it twinkles like a star, and where it falls it is eaten up by something lovely.

“I think I got lost. So I came here.” (Came back here.) She looks up, her golden eyes meeting the colourful girl's – selfsame.

and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.