These seconds are almost a dream.
Because when she closes her eyes she can almost see the edges blur as she moves to touch them; they melt against the warmth of her skin, warping, twisting, until they’re nearly unrecognizable.
She wants to touch more than just edges.
She wants to reach her palms out against the spaces between their bodies and feel silver skin against her own, but Cordis blurs and warps like edges, too.
‘I missed you,’ she says, a ship in the night.
And Spyndle says nothing, because she would so easily destroy them for something as useless as being right.
Even though she remembers touching her for the first time, and how it felt like lightening hitting water – how it had felt like she could measure the length of it, even if electricity wasn’t tangible, because her current spilt across the surface of her skin and she’d felt her body drawn into quarters.
“I miss seeing you,” she finally answers – “apart from everything else.”
Because once she looked at her without remembering.
Because once she looked at her and thought she was beautiful instead of painful.
Because once she’d felt like instinct.
Once she’d felt like poems and physics, like gravity, and now all that she feels like are handfuls of sand – because she can’t be held, because Spyndle can’t keep her from falling through the cracks of her fingers.
And these seconds are almost dream.
She hears the breath catch in her lungs. She sees the lightening on her skin.
To love her, Spyndle thinks, is to love your own destruction. To love her is to walk in silence toward the flames of a silver alter and lay down across them – to burn, and say, ‘thank you’ – and once those flames have burnt to cinder and ash, to love her is to pour gasoline across the coals and ask for more.
…
‘You are the same,’ he says.
“I wish I weren’t,” she answers, meaning it – not knowing how it’s possible to stay the same when she’s been torn apart and sewn back together as many times as this.
Can he follow the seams of her?
Do they spell out her truths like braille across her hips?
Because she wishes that she were different.
Because she wishes that he found her – that he’d never let her go the day the ravens were hungry for their eyes.
‘I’m less trapped with them closed,’ he’d said once with his eyes shut. She closes her own eyes now. She doesn’t know that she loves him, but she knows that she could. She knows that in his bones exist something that she’s been searching for all of her existence – something that she’d found and lost so many times before this moment.
“I would have been yours. I would have been whatever you needed me to be, if you kept her away.”
Because he held the blackbirds back once, and she’d thought that maybe he was capable of more.
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know