when you're dreaming with a broken heart
The mountain shook, and the flowers in her mane and tail blossomed, and still she remains alone.
She has not moved from the spot she had been in when the dust first found her, though dawn had since broke across the sky and the sun was now warming the hidden meadow she stood in. There had been a moment, briefly, where she had felt something that wasn’t exactly happiness, but perhaps a moment of contentment. A rare flutter of her once dead but eternally broken heart, a fleeting feeling of peace, and the idea that perhaps hope still existed.
Perhaps hope could bloom the same way the flowers had — unexpectedly, and out of nowhere.
The enormity of her grief crushes on top of her, though, heavier than gravity, because it is all she has ever known. When she had first been released from the afterlife it had still been present even if she had not had a name for it, even if she could not place why it existed. But the longer she was alive, the more the haze of death began to clear.
The memories came back, one by one.
Her father and the way he cruelly stolen the last of her innocence from her, in some twisted romantic display of being unable to cope with the death of her mother.
The blind child of incest born from it, the one that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t love. She named her Wretch, so that the girl would know without her ever having to say it. That made it better, she thinks. To not actually say it.
She remembers finding love — twice — and having it ripped away both times. She supposes that is karma. If she couldn’t love her own child, incest or not, it made sense that she did not deserve love at all.
The feeling of contentment is gone just as fast as it had come, and she remains alone in this corner of the meadow, flowers woven in her hair, like some kind of mockery of who she had once been.
She has not moved from the spot she had been in when the dust first found her, though dawn had since broke across the sky and the sun was now warming the hidden meadow she stood in. There had been a moment, briefly, where she had felt something that wasn’t exactly happiness, but perhaps a moment of contentment. A rare flutter of her once dead but eternally broken heart, a fleeting feeling of peace, and the idea that perhaps hope still existed.
Perhaps hope could bloom the same way the flowers had — unexpectedly, and out of nowhere.
The enormity of her grief crushes on top of her, though, heavier than gravity, because it is all she has ever known. When she had first been released from the afterlife it had still been present even if she had not had a name for it, even if she could not place why it existed. But the longer she was alive, the more the haze of death began to clear.
The memories came back, one by one.
Her father and the way he cruelly stolen the last of her innocence from her, in some twisted romantic display of being unable to cope with the death of her mother.
The blind child of incest born from it, the one that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t love. She named her Wretch, so that the girl would know without her ever having to say it. That made it better, she thinks. To not actually say it.
She remembers finding love — twice — and having it ripped away both times. She supposes that is karma. If she couldn’t love her own child, incest or not, it made sense that she did not deserve love at all.
The feeling of contentment is gone just as fast as it had come, and she remains alone in this corner of the meadow, flowers woven in her hair, like some kind of mockery of who she had once been.
the waking up is the hardest part
ANONYA
