come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you
There is a broken kind of quiet in her heart that never used to be there - a bruise that never healed. You can see it in the dark that hides in eyes that were once soft and warm and full of love, full of laughter. In the absence of a smile that used to curl the corners of such a beautiful mouth. It is the weight of learning that love is not kind, and that it is not beautiful, that a heart can only be relied upon to break. It is the absence of faith, and the result of years spent festering in a pain she does not know how to step away from.
A pain she does not remember how to live without.
Who is she if she is not broken?
She feels isolated from her family - though in some ways she prefers that now, because she has learned that family, too, can only be relied on to break you. To hurt you. There is so much she does not understand - so much she never will understand - and maybe, in part, this is why she cannot heal. Maybe all those broken edges just keep her torn open and bleeding, and half-hearted bandages are not enough to fix it.
But at least this pain comes with remembering someone she loved more than she ever loved anything else. Like a blade splitting open the spine of her own book, her own body, baring the beautiful and the ugly so that she may never forget it. It is a gift, or a curse, and almost certainly the seed of obsession planted in rotten soil.
She returns to the forest, to the place where he split her neck with his teeth - and she knows the exact pond, the exact curve of bank beside dark water, just as she knows her reflection when she peers down at it. But even though she knows it, it is still the face of a familiar stranger - almost right, yet still somehow all wrong. Empty eyes, no smile, no sign of flickering firefly lights nestled in that tangle of a dark mane. But when she turns her head just so, she can see that old scar he left her, a slash now marked with his black and celestial blue. The only part of him he let her keep.
She watches for so long that she almost forgets to hold on so hard to this ruinous pain, to hold so tightly to a blade that just cuts deeper and deeper into her palm. For just a second, there is almost a smile as she remembers how it felt to have meant something to him, almost a gentleness in her brown eyes as she remembers how beautiful it felt to love and be loved. Then light flares in the star markings of her scar, pinpricks of impossible brightness that she immediately turns away from, leaving the water behind so that she doesn’t have to watch those quiet tears carve familiar rivers down her cheeks.
even though i try not to
