last I saw you were down on your knees; any

[salt]

to make something beautiful should be enough;

 
She is not dead, but sometimes she wonders if she’d be better off.
She doesn’t mean this out of any kind of suicidal ideology, simply that she functions better as a ghost. In that form – shimmering, pale, absent - things are easier. The worries that consume her normal form fade, made meaningless by her faux death.
Indeed, she prefers haunting to this, as she is terribly present in the meadow, uncomfortable in her own skin. Like this, she bumps into solid things, every awkwardness amplified by her solidity.
 
She was bred at a crossroads, this girl, of a woman who was dead too long and a king who wasn’t quite there. What resulted was a perfect mix, not quite dead and not quite alive. She has some of her mother’s beauty and some of her father’s kindness and both of their anxieties, mixed up in this world that isn’t theirs. So it goes.
 
She sighs. She knows she can’t – well, shouldn’t hide as a ghost, that there’s a time in her life when she should do something, meet others. She keeps well enough company with her mother and the other dead things, but she can’t stay there before.
And besides, there is something - a wanting that Salt lacks the words to describe, a certain ache in her bones. She can’t put words to it, but if she could, the word would be closest to loneliness.
Salt is not dead, but she is strange, and lonely.
 

salt