you always loved the strange birds; adaline

[adaline]

— A D A L I N E — your mouth is poison; your mouth is wine (you think your dreams are the same as mine) “Oh,” she breathes. Oh. He speaks of the girl he has met and emotion blooms in her--one she has never encountered before. Her heart thumps painfully against her rips as she attempts to catch the breath so quickly leaving her lips. She imagines her brother with another, and her heart trips. Jealousy blossoms like the flowers facing the sun, and she closes her pink eyes for a moment to contain herself--to reel back the violent storms into the tranquil lake of her breast. “That sounds lovely,” she lies as her eyes open to a tilt of a smile. With the practice of one who speaks falsely often, her expression goes lax and quiet and blank. Her smile goes from the pained twist of lip to placid and dreamy; her vision becomes unfocused. Adaline concentrates on the containing of vivid, thorny emotion as she reminds herself that she cannot keep him for herself. She cannot be selfish. (But, oh, she wants to. Life has given her so little. Life has fed her the promise of beauty wrapped in the packaging of death. It has given her access to life through a veil. It has given once and taken twice. The only gift in her life is the companionship of her brother, and the comfort in his smile. And now she must share?) These words go unspoken though. Instead, she rolls her shoulders and flutters the tattered edges of her wings as she gives a faint, silver-bell laugh. “Elsewhere,” she murmurs as she looks to the horizon. “I wandered.” It sounds so much prettier when she packages it as an adventure instead of an exercise in fear; it sounds so much braver when she does not touch on the nights spent cowering in the shadows. “It was beautiful out there,” she lies again and finally brings herself to meet his gaze. “But I found myself missing home.” Finally, the truth.