I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
“It doesn’t matter.” Her voice crackles in her throat—splintering with desperation, choked out in the moments when her mouth is not preoccupied with the curve of his neck and the sweet saltiness of his flesh. “It doesn’t matter,” because maybe if she says it more than once, she will believe it. She will believe it did not matter when she stood there, looking down on his lifeless eyes, the blood having left his body to puddle next to him.
It did not matter how she had screamed until her vessels almost burst; it did not matter how she had gone blind to the wolf girl who had done this. It did not matter how she had not seen anything but the broken, awkward angles of her brother on the ground and how, although she had expected tears to come, none had.
(It didn't matter.)
It didn't matter that when the screams had ended, she had fallen to the ground, wrapping herself around him, dry eyes closing as she took in the fading scent of his body, cheek resting against his cold, papery skin, grief twisting her heart.
(It didn't matter.)
It didn't matter how she had not been sure how long she had lain there next to him (hours, days, weeks perhaps) but how, when she rose, the desperation and disbelief had flooded over her again—and how she, steeled with whispers of those with powers—had left. She had known the stories. Stories of those who could do impossible things, dancing between the lines of life and death and the beyond and here. She knew the stories, and she knew that there had to be truth in them.
(It didn't matter)
It didn't matter how she had left. How she had left and, with each step, how she had found herself consumed with it. How she had run, how she had hunted—eventually how she had found. How she found someone with answers and then someone with solutions, but not free ones. It didn't matter how those answers, those solutions had come with a heavy price that she would eventually have to pay…but not today.
(It didn't matter. It did not.)
It doesn't matter that someday she will have to tell him the exchange she made for his life.
It doesn't matter.
Today, she focuses on him and the lack of space between them, this gift they had been given, and she said the words that had been so fatal before, the words that had killed him and almost killed her. The words that are poison and words they both know are as true—words she cannot fight, cannot deny any longer. “I love you.”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator