There’s a girl there, but you can’t see her.
Spring paints the rest of the world with an unlimited palette. The trees bud and then blossom and then push the flowers from the branches to coat the ground. Where they fall, the ground becomes a canvas of colors: the virgin white of the dogwoods, the pale pink of the magnolias, and the soft purple of the hawthorns. Where they’ve vacated, bright green leaves begin to unfurl and turn towards the sun. Amongst the stationary beauty, new creatures start to stir as well. Eggs crack and babies drop from their winter-weary mothers. They bring their own colors, too, these newborns. But theirs’ are drawn from an earthier, muted palette. They mimic the soil and the leaves of another season; like fall, they are all browns and blacks with pops of white here and there.
She is painted much the same, but you can’t see her.
She wears the wholly garbed trees as her own sort of coat. When you look right at her, all you can see are the magnolias and dogwoods fully resplendent. All you can watch is the careless weaving of the songbirds between the boughs of her cover (even they wonder why the air seems solid and impenetrable, though they are similarly blind to what is right before their eyes).
Her mother goes about her life in the same way as the birds, wavering and purposeless. She hadn’t seen the girl, either (not really, not in the way a mother should with pressed lips and worried eyes) despite Eila’s deep longing. See me, she’d thought so many times and so desperately that her brain hurt from the silent mantra it played. I am here, Mother. Don’t you see me? But Emmerly was largely lost to her, lost to herself. Her life had been in a happy orbit that had been violently shifted. She is off-kilter now, spinning further and further away from a world she had once been drawn to.
Because the girl’s father had seen her mother.
Because Emmerly couldn’t hide in plain sight when the wolf had come upon her.
Eila will not make the same mistakes. She had run away through the same forest that Pollock had found her mother, her heart full of loss and longing in equal measure. But the part of her that ached for Em’s guidance also came from a deeply-rooted selfishness. Her father had given her his own gifts, after all. A well of mud and tar and grime springs from her half of her genes, poisoning her blood even in their dormant state. She won’t watch her dam’s suicidal spiral; she won’t steer the course away from her inevitable collision with the sun. Maybe she doesn’t want to see it, to witness the once-proud warrior be defeated by despair. Maybe she does. Maybe a part of her wants to know that Emmerly burned in the end.
You can’t see the girl, but she’s there. Motherless by her own choice. Fatherless by his own choice. She is there, invisible against a line of foliage bursting with all the colors she is not. She tries to be quiet, even though many wander just beyond her little shelter, but a sudden movement catches in the corner of her eye and she startles. A branch cracks beneath her feet. The birds take off immediately, their wavering motions streamlined as they take to the sky. Eila loses concentration and she is there, suddenly.
Visible.
Eila
ooc: IT'S PROBABLY OBVIOUS I am still feeling her out...lol. No Dale, otherwise go for it