I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
If she were younger, perhaps there would be some whimsy to it.
If she ever smiled, perhaps she could be mistaken for someone adventurous.
Bright-eyed and curious, someone with an appetite for life and everything in it.
But she is none of those things and there is no whimsy to her wandering. Instead, there is a certain melancholy to the way she looks for something that she’ll never find. She wanders because her father taught her to and sometimes she misses his patient smile and his good nature so fiercely that it makes her ache and she takes to the forest or the meadow or the edge of the river as if she might find it there. Or, at least, something like it.
She never has and she knows that she never will, but still she searches. She continues to break her own heart, taking her grief between her teeth, letting it dissolve on her tongue. Because she is nothing and no one and she has never meant much to anyone except her father. She supposes it’s her fault – or, she would if she allowed herself to dwell on these things.
She’d found a home in Sylva but she has not yet learned how to trust the silence there. She understands the silence here, but the quiet there makes her skin tremble. The quiet here wraps itself around her shoulders like a blanket and, despite the heavy canopy, the sun ensconces her in sweet heat.
She happens upon him by accident, deep in the darkness. The creatures she encounters here are generally strange and fantastical and she stops short when she sees him, stricken by the way he seems to glow even in all this darkness (he is so pale that he seems to emanate his own light). She presses her mouth into a thin, thoughtful line, and ventures closer.
“Are you looking for something?” she asks, though she’s never been particularly brave.
lilian
@[Bruja]