come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you
She keeps each part of her past on a distant shelf in a faraway room, keeps that room locked away behind a door with no handle with which to open it again because she knows that these broken pieces in her chest can withstand no more of the ruin that seems to love her so. Each beautiful face, every single happy memory she had once looked back upon with a lightness dancing eagerly beneath her skin, they’re all locked away because each one hides a blade within itself made solely to cut the threads still holding her together.
These days she has too few to spare.
Any fewer and she would be little more than dark hollows beneath her eyes and deep valleys between her ribs.
So she distances herself because it is easier than remembering how to be the girl she used to be. The girl who believed in love and the purpose of all things, in belonging, in family. It hurts to remember that girl, because she had trusted so readily, loved so easily. She had given all of herself to the wrong one every single time she tried, until finally when her eyes opened again and she felt the gaping emptiness in her chest, it was her own sister that held the pulp of her very broken heart.
It was betrayal like she had never even fathomed, cut through her so deep that it poisoned her to the core.
Forever changed.
Family is not what she ever imagined. Dad and mom are either lucky or liars, because love like theirs just doesn’t exist. Only her children have ever been worthy of it, worthy because they are hers, and because in that they are perfect. She does not consider anyone else, not Dovev who would always own some vital piece of her heart, not Stillwater who taught her what it was to feel love for the very first time. Not Kharon, a boy but so much kinder than she deserved, so gentle with all those broken pieces until his heart carried him elsewhere. Certainly not Fenris, handsome and steadfast, who had only ever built her up when the world tried to tear her down to her rivets, Fenris, who she thinks might have loved her in secret while she was too busy falling on the same blade and wishing for change.
Lies, of course, she relives all of them endlessly. In the dark, and in the night, whenever there is no light to chase the deep shadows from her heart.
Like now, and always.
So it is with a surreal sense of disconnect that the words in her memories suddenly find her here in this place, and that they find her wearing a voice that is exactly as it should be. Odd, isn’t it. She blinks, and as always it is a battle to will her eyes open again, a war waged against a kind of exhaustion that feels corrosive down to her bones, a poison that changes her even now. But when she does open them again, there is a face, a man, that makes her wish she hadn’t. “You can’t be here.” She says, to him and at him, to herself, so quiet the sound could be muted by the whispering of butterfly wings.
But he is here - she can smell him, though the scent is only vaguely familiar now, changed by time or memory. She can feel the heat of him too as she looks up into a pair of eyes that look almost as startled as hers (comforting, somehow). She takes a step back to be free of the warmth of him and the old ache it coaxes back to life inside the stone of her chest. Her face is harder than he’ll remember it being, her eyes cold like shining stone instead of soft and molten. The girl he remembers is dead, and he doesn’t even know to mourn the loss of her.
“Others have been drawn to my light, but you were always drawn to my dark.” She tells him quietly after a pause, remembering how she had found him first with a fresh wound on her neck, her heart as raw as her injured flesh. How he had held her despite his hesitance. “What do you think of me now? Not even the night has known a dark like me, what with her moon and her stars. I am only me, and only the pieces I have been allowed to keep.”
even though i try not to
