I guess I've got a taste for poison; I've given up on ever being well
I keep mining the horizon, digging for lies I've yet to tell
Perhaps it is dangerous to be so soft.
But she can make the flowers dance just by smiling at them.
And how could she be anything but soft with eyes that bright?
She has spent the first year of her life tucked away someplace safe and warm. Sometimes she swears she can see the glow when she presses herself against her mother. How deliriously happy it makes her to love and know that she is loved in return. Loved so fiercely that she can see it.
She has not wanted to leave that warmth, not knowing that she carries it with her. She has spent days testing it – straying further and further from her mother’s side simply to see when the heat in the center of her chest might fade. But it never does and she calls back to her mother that she’ll be back as she takes to the woods.
And when the darkness closes around her and quickens her pulse, tightens a vise of fear around her throat, she makes the trees sway and dance, she makes the flowers uproot themselves to follow alongside her. She finds peace in these things, refuses to acknowledge that they would not be enough to protect her should she encounter danger. But she delights in the way they follow her, as if propelled simply by their love of her rather than the sliver of magic in her heart.
She has never been to the Playground, but she knows the way. She tips back her head in breathless wonder as she watches the faeries flit overhead, watching the children as they play. The trees behind her go still and the flowers plunge their roots back into the ground as she crosses into the clearing and she casts a mournful glance over her shoulder at them. They had been with her only a short time but she has loved them and considered them friends.
She will make new friends, she thinks, as she ventures into the center of the clearing and turns in one slow, bright-eyed circle.
Lovewell