[private] you feel so lost, adaline

[adaline]

I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right

There is something haunted in her eyes that stays her hand. It makes her heart hurt in her chest, a feeling that she can’t quite understand or comprehend or even begin to give a voice to. Her breath catches in her throat when he tells her that they have met before and confusion blossoms in her expression, unfurling to take over every inch of her face, beginning with the slackness of her mouth as she inhales sharply.

“Oh,” is all she can say at first, and she feels a sharp pain—a dagger that slips between her ribs. Was this to be her payment? Was she to have these memories ripped from her hands? She had known that eventually she would need to pay for the bargain she had made. Had the gods grown tired of waiting?

There is a tear that meets the corner of her eye and slides down a slender cheek.

“I am so sorry, Jarris,” his name feels new on her mouth and her tongue has to work to make the syllables that she echoes after him. It is like she has never said it before. It is like she has never even known it before and that hurts all the more. She takes a step closer, letting her lips rest against his own cheek.

“I have made mistakes,” she whispers, because it feels right to make these confessions with him. It feels right to tell him if they were as close as he claims. “And I think my payment was forgetting you.”

Something about it doesn’t sit right in her throat, but it makes sense so she swallows it down.

“I never wanted to forget you,” she says, because she knows that if and had she known him, it would have been a memory she cherished—a memory that her sister must have cherished, if she even knew of her.

“Will you help me remember?”

Because now, all she can feel is blackness, all she can feel is the fear of what she no longer has.

in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator

Adaline