you always loved the strange birds; adaline

[adaline]

— A D A L I N E — your mouth is poison; your mouth is wine (you think your dreams are the same as mine) She is alive, but she doesn’t expect to be for long. She, like him, doesn’t expect much from this world. Why would she when it has given her so little? She rises with the sun and sleeps with the stars and appreciates each new breath that expands her lungs, but that is it. She is thankful for the time that she has been given on this earth. She is grateful for the sights that she has been able to see, and she scolds herself whenever she begins to yearn for more. She should not have been given even this. This is a gift. Her mother had been dead, her father dying, and she was sculpted from glass. She was not made to weather storms or climb mountains or live a life with blood pumping heavily in her veins. She is, instead, allotted to live however long this earth will have her by wandering quietly in the background. To be content with each breath and to be happy with the small pleasures. She is meant to live but not thrive. Adaline is not built to sustain storming passions and great tragedies and loves as big as the ocean. If she is to love, she is meant to do so quietly and with great restraint. If she is to dream, she must do so with the greatest caution. Tread lightly, my dear. Dream softly. Live gently. But that is not what she contains in her breast. There lives an ache for the wonders of this world and the fluttering wings of a heart that beats for something she may never attain. Tranquil, dreamy smiles and long-lashes eyes bely the ways in which she finds herself aching for more. To shout or to run or to fly. Fly with these tattered paper wings shooting out from her back like the cruelest of jokes. So it takes everything within her when she sees her brother.  It takes all of her restraint to not run to him and hold him and be held. Instead, she merely alters her course and comes up by his side. “Contagion,” she murmurs in her breathy voice, taking in the beauty of her graceful, delicate brother. He who seemed so ethereal and so much more than she. “I have missed you so.”