Time was fleeting once.
And now every second without her feels twice as long.
She used to know what she was made of. She used to know that she was a wild-thing, that she did not belong at the ends of astringent tethers, or behind the worn iron bars of metal birdcages. She ran from wolves, but nothing else. Time has made her into something else entirely, because she used to move through meadows without regret. She didn’t know then that things existed strong enough to hold her. She used to be a wild-thing without a name, but she isn’t now.
They tried to show her. They came in hordes to cut her wings, to hold her down. They gave her names she would not keep. They taught her the feel of iron and leather. They drove her to madness, but she was still not theirs. They taught her cruelty, but she was still a wild-thing. She still sprouted wings in the suffocating black of a mountain cave. She was still nameless. She didn’t know then that things existed strong enough to hold her, but they did.
Today the air is warm. It tangles with the stifling smell of wildfire smoke and the heat of summer, and despite the heaviness in the air that leaves sweat rolling off the slopes of her hips there is a chill that rattles deep in the marrow of her bones that she cannot shake. It’s hard to feel warmth when half of you is missing, and that’s what this feels like. It feels like she is not whole, like she is one small half of something severed. It feels like seeing with one eye. It feels like trying to breathe when your lungs have collapsed. It feels like singing without a voice.
And it felt like rainfall once.
Like she was the daughter of air and water. Like she was made from the love affairs hidden in the smoke of clouds. Like the skies were a stage that she had danced across for all of her existence, and she had never known the weight of gravity. It felt like rainfall. It felt like leaving home, like falling through the atmosphere and hurdling down at one thousand miles an hour. It felt like a collision. It felt like hitting earth. It felt like breaking apart into one thousand pieces.
It felt like dying once.
It felt like leaving behind her body and her bones. It felt like burrowing trails through the dirt like an earthworm, or the tangled roots of wildflowers. It felt like air, rising. It felt like watching everything she used to know, and everything she used to love, standing in tight semi-circles around a mound of freshly turned earth with black veils drawn neatly across their mourning faces. It felt like reading an ancient white cross with letters etched against the grain of it’s wood, and those letters spelled out her name. It felt like that.
She used to know what she was, but she was eclipsed by the things that she wanted. She was smothered by the gravity of loving something. She was ruined by kindness, and stubbornness. She became something else. Time made her something else. Time made them both into something else.
So, she follows the trails of ash and devastation, and they lead her to this place. She cannot haunt the meadow again, even if she died there once, even if she died there in so many different ways. She cannot stay when every tree looks like a hazel. She cannot stay when the river always reminds her of mermaids with pearls in their hair. She cannot stay when the horizon rolls out in every direction and floods her eyes with the memories of sunsets that broke her and made her whole again but as something different.
So, she follows a trail of black birds with black glass eyes, and she doesn’t realize the correlation. She doesn’t remember the one that circled overhead the day they said goodbye. She doesn’t want to.
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know