02-15-2019, 04:50 PM
All of the voices inside of my mind will never be silenced
It’s ironic, truthfully, that her parents guilt should create a guilt of her own. Even though it’s a foolish thing, it seems there is no preventing the foibles of the mind. They way it inevitably and invariably must turn back on oneself. Even now she can feel it in her mother, the thoughts that weigh so heavily, the self-recrimination at having allowed her eldest daughter to nearly drown. She shakes her head, but it does not clear the thoughts. Just as she had known it wouldn’t.She had known better than to wade so far into the sea. Even as she’d splashed farther and farther, distracted by the buoyant water, by the way she could splash and roll, she’d had the niggling thought she should return to shore. That she shouldn’t go so far out. It wasn’t safe. But it had been fun, and before she’d known it, she had found the sand dropping from beneath her feet. Only moments later the riptide had snagged her, before she could rectify her mistake.
It’s her fault. All of this. But she doesn’t know how to fix it.
So instead she comes here, staring into the ocean, wondering why it had been her. The answers never come, of course. Only the ceaseless crashing of waves and the nauseating prattle of thoughts.
For a moment, she has trouble distinguishing the thoughts for her mother’s voice, but when she does, she lifts her head, eyes rising to meet the dark gaze of her mother. She closes her eyes briefly as she presses a kiss to her forehead. For all that the thoughts pressing in constantly might trouble her, she is comforted to know the unfailing love her parent’s feel for her. Sometimes her mother seemed only able to think of this ability as a curse, but Persea knew it could be a gift sometimes too.
Her breath catching softly in her throat, she crushes herself into her mother’s chest, pressing her face into the familiar shoulder as she curls against her, needing to feel the comfort of her mother’s embrace and the warmth of the love she so often struggled to show the outside world.
“Me too, Mom,” she whispers against her, squeezing her eyes closed. She regrets the grief she had caused them so much, the pain she knows they feel. “I just… don’t know what to do,” she finishes after a moment. She didn’t need to say it aloud, she knows, but doing so made it real, in a way. Made it into something that, maybe, she could solve.
until I can find a way to let go of what we left behind
persea
