[mature] we're setting fire to our insides for fun; ophie

[adna]

and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones
‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs

He is calm, like a river, and she wonders what it must be like to live a life so unaffected by the things around you—to simply accept what comes, what happens, as another part of the day. She cannot live like this, no matter how she tries. She simply feels everything too strongly—whether it be love or joy or even hatred. It seeps into her bones and fuses with every atom. It transforms her into the beast of the day, and she wishes that she could have his tranquil nature, the ease with which his lips tip upward.

Perhaps it is this that brings her back to him. Perhaps it is jealousy of him, a desire to unlock the secrets of his easy manner. Perhaps it is some deep-seated hope that being near him will allow her to pick up on the secrets of his soul; perhaps she hopes that, one day, she too will be able to smile so easily.

Regardless, she has not picked up on such secrets yet, and she is left feeling open and vulnerable before his blue ocean eyes. “I haven’t looked,” she says bluntly and only after such things have left her lips does she wonder if they are unkind. Her mother would never exhale such things, she thinks with shame, but she has long since forfeit any hope of growing into her mother’s calm loveliness.

She is not to possess such grace, such a soft heart.

But neither will she experience the pain her mother has—that is a promise to herself.

At his question, she laughs but the sound is dull and she looks down, brow furrowing and the corners of her lips dropping. “I ran,” she rolls her lean shoulders, “but I don’t know if I have a home to run from.” She looks back up at his confession and something rolls across her features, an undercurrent of something that she can’t quite name. “I don’t deserve to be missed,” a glimpse of fang against her lip as she studies the depths of his gaze, “but I have missed you and I don’t deserve to miss you either.”

adna

we're setting fire to our insides for fun
collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home

@[Ophanim]