05-05-2015, 12:02 AM
She left them, too, but she left in smaller ways.
She shut her eyes against her cheek and pretended to sleep while everyone else fell away, because it would be easiest without reminders.
It would be easiest to wake in the daylight reeking of wet dirt and dew, rather than passion and fervor – because it would be easiest to open her eyes and be met with the morning, rather than the glint of metal and the sting of memory. ‘Take it then,’ she had spat at a God who was so much bigger. ‘Take it then,’ she had said, calling a bluff that she had thought would never see fruition. ‘ Take it then,’ she had said, and he had laughed.
He had laughed, and thanked her for her stupidity like Gods thank mortals all the time.
But she left them, too.
She left them in kinder ways. She let the gaps between their bodies grow, and did not a thing to stop the distance, because it is easiest without reminders, to shut eyes and pretend that things will be okay even when they won’t. She shut her eyes that night, pulled her lashes to the tops of her cheeks, and feigned sleep while Cordis feigned flight, because it is easiest to pretend instead of let the guilt eat you alive.
So why can she still feel the teeth?
Why are there holes torn through her skin? Why is there blood? Why can she see the gaps between her bones, the sinew, and the tendons? She dug her feet into tongue, threw her claws into throat, so how has it still swallowed her? She would be wondering still if it were not for the glint of metal, of memory, that rounds the bend and burns her eyes.
‘Spyndle,’ memory says, and though the part of her lips is slight, somehow there are rivers, and sunsets, and hazels that pass between them (slip over her tongue and through her teeth like lyrics to a lullaby). How can any one being feel so magic? She is more than silver. She is more than an element. She is more than titans, and more than gravity. ‘Spyndle,’ is all she says, but it feels like poetry.
Loving Cordis is a lot like loving poetry, because she is beautiful in the way that poems are, and she is sad in the way that poems can be. Loving Cordis is like loving poetry, because the lines of her body roll and rise like prose.
Because how can you touch poetry? Because how can you hold it in your hands and call it yours?
“How could you…” is all that she says, when she can fathom words. But it is not what Cordis might think. She left, too. She left, too.
“How could you come back to me, after what I’ve done?”