so we let our shadows fall away like dust
It feels like she is always drifting now, a brittle gold leaf caught within the push and pull of dark currents. Everything is different now, changed, and yet somehow same. This pain in her chest is solely hers, carefully hidden and tucked away from prying eyes, a task that is decidedly difficult for a face as expressive as hers. But she tries anyway because this ache is her fault, her burden, hers to bear.
She keeps it safe like a secret.
The snow underfoot is dull and faded, churned with the mud that softens beneath it at the looming promise of spring. She doesn’t like when winter looks like this, dirty and used, fading until it is gone altogether. It is the ugly in-between of light and bight and a world etched in ice, in starlight, and the newness of spring that will come later, differently light and bright, etched in green instead.
It is the forest that she chooses to wander through, a world so familiar she would know it in her sleep – know it better even than the plains and hollows of Stillwater’s body, and that was a thing she new intimately, exquisitely. A thing she missed endlessly, achingly, like a breath she could not take. It made her lungs, her chest, her heart too tight, made it so that she could not or would not or did not want to breathe. Even despite that survival reflex that told her she must.
A bird keens somewhere above her head, loud and lonely, and she wonders why it hadn’t left with the others, flying for warmer lands before winter had a chance to settle and strip the world bare. It keens again but this time she turns from the sound, ducking that small face to where she can tuck her chin against her chest and hide from such sharp loneliness. “I’m sorry.” She says to the bird, a broken sound, whisper-soft and silver when it slips past those pale lips. “I’m not who you want anyway.” The words are heavy with a second meaning, with an echo of her pain, of the glass in her chest.
When she turns and leaves, it is to move deeper into the trees, deeper into shadow where it is easier to hide. But she doesn’t activate her camouflage, not yet, pausing for one last moment beneath a beam of pale light where it leaks through bare, skeletal branches. In this uncertain light, she is dusty blue and delicate, etched in a sorrow that draws sharp lines of shadow across her hips and shoulders, hollows near her cheeks. Then she abandons that, too, and slips further into the dark.
