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
To love was to lie.
She had lied to Contagion when she had told him that it did not matter—that the months spent mourning a death she had caused did not matter. She had lied because nothing had mattered more. She had cut herself on the glass of him splintering and shattering on the falls floor. She had pressed herself into the shards of it, knowing that it was he who cut her and that it was right in some way. She had caused this; she had made him into this. He had been whole and beautiful and perfect; he had been in love.
She had been selfish and silly and screamed out the ugly disease of her heart.
And he had died for it.
And she had told him that what happened after had not mattered.
It was a lie that she tucked into her heart because she could not bear to tell him. She could not bear to tell him how she had wandered and begged and pleaded for a solution. She could not bear to look him in the eye that she had found one and that solution was why he stood and breathed now—but that the solution did not come without a cost. It was a heavy one, and one she could not bring herself to tell him about.
She couldn’t force herself to watch his eyes change when he learned the truth.
She would not survive it.
So she lied—to him, to herself, to the world. She lied and spent hours by his side, knowing it was wrong to love her brother as she loved him but not caring. She spent hours by his side and, when they were apart as they were now, she let herself go dreamy. She lied to herself and let herself believe in the gossamer world that she had weaved for herself as a child. It was so much easier than looking at the stark truth of it.
“Most haven’t,” she says with a smile, shrugging her thin shoulders. “Although most do their best to look at anything but me.” She didn’t mind that truth; it had long since lost its edges. She remembered some of her first wanderings in the meadow—when disgusted eyes had cut her to her core. When it left her uncomfortable with tears pricking the corners of her eyes. Now, she simply accepted it. As much as she accepted the naked curiosity in his own gaze. “Glass is not made to survive as long as I have,” she admits, wondering at how easy that is for her to know. “I think that impossibility makes others uncomfortable.”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator