You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
She is consumed by the seething, heady crowd; gives herself to it.
Or what slips of herself that can be clawed back from the hard, vain cage of quiet, contained animus; from the scowl of lip and the narrowed, indignant slit of bright, sky-blue eye.
That scorched, elemental rage that had subsumed itself to her like venom as a young girl. First, as the fangs sunk deep into her knee. In the swimming, white-hot reverie that followed, as reached up to Solis and found she could wrap herself around the radiant, holy rays of Him to pull grace down upon herself like fiery armour; swirling into the Beyond-Beyond-The-Sand as a crusader. And second, before she lost grip of her consciousness, as she brought the small, curved janbiya down and pinned the writhing, furious stygian serpent to the dunes.
Blood pooled on the sun-baked sand, staining it a red so dark it was almost black.
She had died and come back that day.
El’Alafir-Uquaa.
The Serpent Slayer.
—died and come back many times after, too.
Cyrra shoulders inebriates out of her way with grunts and sharp, barbed stares, as day passes, bruise-purple and bright tangerine, into night. Her pale wings are held tight against her body, extending roughly now and then to claim distance between herself and the rabble. Moonlight begins to pool in the crowded streets as braziers and strings of lanterns are lit, one by one, offering their own oily, dancing light to the market streets; catching, warm and golden, in the burnished curves of her serpentine neckpiece.
She had awoken, moonstruck and feeble as a sprig grown in a place without light—a place where light goes to die—to a Solterra invaded. Inviting. Opened, like the arms of some indiscriminate lover, libertine and rowdy; redolent with spilt wine and ale, like petrichor, but sour and fermented. Sweat, bodies, exotic perfumes and something more. Something many-tongued and violent in its greed. Something she could not place her finger on, but could feel its heartbeat trying to match her own—warpaths and bedsheets; skin rent and skin touching.
All the trappings of the festival that she wished to lose herself in. To take and remake herself with; to replace the putrid, charnel abyss with music and brutality.
Anything, at all, to remind her she is alive.
To pull back the layers of swart and funereal aloneness.
A spare, elegant man, dressed in a hooded cloak of brilliantly vibrant beadwork, rings of jewelled gold in his nose and ears, approaches her, extending delicate, crystalline bottles of clear, suggestive attars—jasmine and oud, rose and saffron. ‘...Something cool for you, sayidat alnaar, to temper your flame—might I suggest honeysuckle and citrus…’ Her iron gaze lingers for a moment on the oils, listing in their glass containers as he tilts them back and forth slowly, beckoning.
She is jostled and groans, teeth clenching. She shakes her head curtly and hisses, “bother someone else,” before moving off, gripping herself all the more tightly. Guarded and ungiving in the dizzy night, she meanders, searching and seething; moving through pools of light and dark, merchants hawking fine jewellery and indelicate bottles of thick, homemade brews. The once-Arete, now errant ember of a dead sun, shakes her head to most but throws a couple of gold coins to a hard, aged man selling strange, floral wine in sea glass bottles.
(Then, she almost runs into you. Some wasted and wonton stranger bumps into her, slurs uncouth and bawdy apologies and disappears into the night-clad streets.)
She mutters a string of creative expletives, iron gaze falling on the gilt, gunmetal stranger, breath smelling of lotus, vanilla and alcohol; body as hard as coiled springs, “gods-damned tourists.”
In the gloaming darkness between the fires, one full of frail scepters of death and decay, Thana is not another hound of hell pressing hungrily to the fires and the lamplight warring against the blackness. The night feels like a fractured thing around her, like a bone half-alive and half-buried. And she wonders how they can bare it, this mockery of thin veils and overlapping worlds, even as she walks among them as a thing full of light and life instead of death.
She did not ask the children's names, only watched them with her heavy gaze like a lion might watch sparrows dancing around the edges of it's kill. They received no questions from her, only a bit of coin passed strangely with her teeth as if she's never learned how to exists in the world of mortals things born, and raised, and loved. And she did not answer any of theirs as the painted her in glittering swirls of silver and gold.
“It tells the story of the first hallowed one who braved the cusp.” The youngest of the orphans told her, hardly pausing to speak as she painted billowing clouds upon her blood-red cheek.
“Everyone knows the story.” The oldest of them whispered as she braided pearls and silvered acorns and leaves into Thana's mane. Perhaps she needed to gather the courage to braid them into the hair hiding a blade from the sight, as she started to whisper the story that everyone was supposed to know only to fill the silence...
It's the story that pools in the places between her heartbeats and her hoof-steps. It races in the streaks of whiteness breaking up the darkness each time she blinks slower than a living thing should. And it lives in each chiming echo of pearl and silver-dipped acorn as her braid tangle together as she walks though the too-thick crowds and the wilting grasses holding out against the cooling nights.
She wonders how like the hollowed one she is, a thing full of aching and hunger with teeth too rotten to eat a thing. Or if she the wolf in the story, dragging at any bit of spectral flesh as it tries to carry the hollowed one back to the underneath?
Or is she neither because this world is not her own?
And yet.
Yet.
When she sees him, soft and gilded in fire-light, Thana wants to howl to the moon, and all the things the children said are living in the air tonight. She wants to beg, and bellow, and stitch it into the darkness of her decay, just this one thing. And when she presses her shoulder to his, and drags her silver and gold between their skin only so that the story might live like a stain between them, she whispers only this one to all the aching places living like weeds in the darkness between her heart and her soul.
Thana smiles against his neck, as much as a monster like her can, and she presses the soft curl of her side against his (as if her flesh is saying, just this one, too). Firelight pools in her horn gilding it into a weapon against the darkness instead of one for it. Her teeth drag lines in his neck as she pulls away.
Let this one be mine.
Her lips are too hard against his cheek to be called a kiss as she presses them there before moving so they are only touching side to side (protecting that one secret that belongs to them alone). “Have you discovered the other world they are all whispering about?” Because it has always lived in her like a black-snaked waiting in the core of her.
But tonight, tonight she's drowning it in a sea of howling, and bellowing, and braying.
And she wonders if he can see it too, waiting there like a sickle moon beneath the eclipse of him.
The memory of Raziel's skeletal summerborne solitude paws like a pining dog at his feet; a dog that hopes for a bone - or a touch - or indeed anything at all.
For it is autumn and he has been waiting for the change to come.
Anticipation is a cumbersome business, one that impedes and distracts; a man might lose an entire fortnight to the affair if they are not careful. Raziel likes to think of himself as careful, if he does not know indeed that he is careful, but even the most meticulous of gentlemen can fall foul of apprehension if the very issue they laggardly await refuses to rear its ugly head.
You see, Raziel does not like distraction nor anticipation and most certainly he does not like change.
Raziel likes the gunmetal grey of his cellar floor, he likes when the day closes and the morning opens, he likes the click of his bedroom door sealing out the face of his aunt. These things he knows. They will not alter. They furnish the salve that soothes his hidden wounds.
But he is not a fool.
Raziel is well aware that adjustments and modifications to his small, fastidious world will always come knocking whether he likes it or not.
Still, awareness of universal truth does not seem to make the acceptance of it any easier.
Every year the expiration of summer promises to bring many revisions to Raziel's routine and none of them are pretty.
(The return of his family from their remodelled apartment in the city, the cold, the swell in the number of Saudagar's household staff, the worsening of Gahenna's mood, his birthday. They shrank and paled, nevertheless, under the weight of Raoul's deathday. The anniversary of his brother's slaughter somehow felt both sharper and duller with every passing year.)
And so here, under the pinched shadow of a palm tree, man and hound stand in a shared silence, holding vigil to a summer they wished would last forever.
The nagging distaste of uncertainty accompanied Hälla well into their journey, leaving her blind to the fortuitous grace that her tomb had, perhaps mercifully, been upon the lip of the desert. Her steps had taken her deeper into its embrace, but with her red-cloaked companion taking the helm, it wasn’t long before the sea of grass unfurled. A tremendous juxtaposition from the dunes they had fled, she noted, almost instantaneously, the herds of bison that swam through the fading browns and greens of foliage.
Solterra had been willfully ignorant to the turning tide of the season, and insofar as the waking woman might’ve known, summer had held the rolling sands within its heated thrall. The balm of a kissing wind was the first change she felt, accompanied by the rustling sound of distant, whispering fields. The twitter of animals was a song further off, and yet one that nonetheless spoke to her in ancient tongues, weaving tales of things long forgotten.
Two stories lay within the corridors of her thoughts, and the bits and pieces that unraveled with each silent step caused her gut to roll, a quivering nausea that caused the world to tilt upon its axis. Only her quiet as they walked betrayed the wrongness that came and went, an unsteady, incessantly lapping wave—
She was no moon in comparison to her turbulent sea. It did not heed her pull, her call; it sloshed as violently as it pleased, threatening to drown her. Only the sheer will of her person kept her head afloat, the stubbornness of fearful pride serving as a buoy amid the squall. And if her mind was the sea, her memories were undoubtedly a storm.
They came in bolts of lightning; they roared in groaning thunder; they chilled her to the bone with pelts of hale and rain.
But Hälla pressed onward unflinchingly, her chin lifted, and her wearied steps unfettered. The prairie was a new horizon to which he guided her, a port to house a woman that both knew it and did not. It was frustrating, it was humiliating—it was almost enough to rouse tears of frustration to her moony eyes.
Almost. And yet, nowhere near enough.
Hälla knew this place, and yet she did not know it. It begged her to remember, the tender grasses kissing her fetlocks with overwhelming compassion, and her silence turned stilted. Quick bursts shattered the reverie of stillness she’d fashioned from woe, and her teeth ground together as she grabbed hold of the memories that sought to take root, and, with vengeance, ripped them up.
She would not remember. Not until she knew what was true—what was true, and what was Arjun’s lie.
She would not remember, because she knew hurt lay in remembering.
The darkness of the tomb had caused enough hurt.
“Stop here,” she grunted, her cloven hooves coming to pause without ceremony within the middle of the prairie, the sun having softened its glow as it began its descent—they’d walked all day, and the rolling plains were mercifully cool.
Hälla was silent as she tipped her head towards the distance, surveying their surroundings with deliberate uncertainty.
“Why you would step beyond that border,” she began, shaking her head. “And into the desert escapes me.” Even if she knew, her bones knew, her blood knew, that the sands had fashioned her. At least in this life.
Something else had been nagging at her every step of the way, watching the sweat bead upon his skin as she shadowed his steps.
“And why you would wear that cloak the entire way,” her lip twitched, the idleness of her conversation no doubt meant to steer her from her thoughts. The words were empty—they were pointless. And she knew that.
They could’ve parted ways now. Hälla didn’t point that out, at least not in plainer words. The distraction was still welcome.
She squints one eye shut, and places the other against the cool brass of the eyepiece.
The world becomes simultaneously smaller and bigger at once. Around her, the granite walls and spires fade to black as she gazes up through the curved lenses at the magnified stars—the old fossilized light blooming glumly in the pitch-black sky above. She follows a line from one star to the next, some large and some too small to have seen without her telescope’s aid, her jaw moving in pensive back-and-forth as she chews the inside of her cheeks.
When she has seen what she needs, she pulls back, blinking both eyes clear; the burnished telescope still hovering in the chill, montane moonlight between her and steep drop-off at her argent toes.
To her right, a piece of almost clean parchment hovers with a pot of ink and feather-quill. The geometric and scientific outlines of the new star chart are accounted for on the lamb’s skin. A large round circle with faint dotted lines of longitude and latitude and hemispheres, numbers and diagrams describing the rising and the falling of the sun and the lengths of seasons. Inside, is a world unmapped. A few stray stars and some of the old constellations that could still be seen, and marked in dark ink and illuminated with illustrations, hold their place.
Most of them are gone, cast into obliteration as the land below them had been.
So she starts a new labour of love and dedication.
The star-shed had told her the mountains were a good place to see Novus’ night sky, and of course, he was right. So she climbed the Armas to a protected precipice near the clouds; the cool, thin air reminding her of home—bringing her closer to the throne Cosmos once sat upon; closer to the enigmatic Caligo, yet a name on an altar she has not yet the heart to approach. The vastness of the universe opens like a book to her here, revealing upon its sable skin the formations and patterns of this strange land, like brilliant freckles. The guiding polestars, and the smaller clutches around them that make up the shapes of curved swords, pulled bows and arching swans.
With careful attention, she unknots their positions, placing them, one by one, on the suspended parchment. She pinches her lip between her teeth. Locating the correct position in the sky, with delicate mind’s grasp, she marks the first star of this new order, and then another, just left of the Father’s Mane, a constellation first discovered in Nordlys that still held its position all these many miles away. Between each new monument of dead light, she commands soft, dashed lines until they have become a new landmark by which to navigate at night, for those who know what to look for.
Stella pots the quill and nods, the parchment comes to hover in front of her in the air beside the glinting telescope. She considers the new constellation, tilts her head and bites the insides of her cheeks.
This hour is her hour. She does not feel the sun, that dips low, like silk along her flesh. Nor the call of songbirds, that beckon nightfall amongst the sudden-evening breeze. Her blood is cold like the moon, and their pulse feathers as winter might. Her immortality, sighing, just barely beneath her cheek; glowing, with pearls and wine. The taste of autumn lingers against her skin. the perfume of dried leaves and coffin soil, twined in her wild, gypsy's hair. every part of her is made for the supernatural. every curve laced in beauty, and sin. how its bewitchment breathes down her spine, now. fore is she not made for spellbound lovers? is she not worth the sacrifice?
euryale calantha dances towards the shadows. she disappears within the caves. in her wake trails a seductive hurricane. the kiss of rot and death, the scent of femininity and vampiric grace, the eyes of hunger and endless thirst, they are all her. in the darkness she uncoils with snake-like fury. moving SILENTLY along the earth, a haunting laugh falling from her lips. SHADOWS of azure shall ACCOMPANY THE PALE-HAIRED mistress, trailing vestiges of smoke against her flesh. trailing over the scales, tattooed across her hips. sweeping her in a mangled gown, that reveals every aching sin, but the sins she keeps secret in her heart. when the eVENING FALLS around her, at last, it is with a final breath of gunmetal smoke. A VELVET WHISPER, as darkness slides over her body in a possessive embrace.
SHE FEELS ITS’ WET EARTH, CRAWLING AGAINST HER back. SHE CAN TASTE IT’S RANK FRAGRANCE, LINGERING as DECAY UPON HER LIPS. IT’S THE DECADENT TASTE OF NIGHTFALL, THAT BRINGS NOCTURNAL LIFE AND THE PROMISE OF BLOOD TO HER JAWS. THE LAST TRACE OF SUNLIGHT, BRUSHING ITS FINAL KISS ALONG HER SIREN CURVES; DESCENDING, INTO A SEA OF IMMACULATE LILAC CURLS, AS they tumble down her shoulders with songs of the damned. she glows as wildfire, bathed in red moonlight. to touch her, is to sleep in the flame. THROUGH THe caves, THe witch PROWLS IN feral ABANDON. HER CURVES, were made BRIGHT AGAINST THEIR ANCIENT surfaces. THE DEEP SCARLET OF HER complexiom, AND THE PORCELAIN OF HER figure, DANCING INBETWEEN THE TORN FABRIC OF REALITY AND MADNESS. HER HEART IS A WILD ANIMAL, as it pants in her chest. a lawless predator that knows no softness. only passion. only death.
for a moment she is still. for a moment, there is but silence. her heartbeat, the only ritual, breathed in the endless dark. her breath spills like mist, unfurling. A hush ENVELOPES THE CAVERNS. A LAMENTATION, USHERED FROM THE DEEP BLACK hell, as it trembles with promise. purring, so wickedly beneath her. SHE CAN FEEL ITS’ RANCID BREATH, SPLITTING FROM THE ETERNAL BLACKNESS. ITS’ SIGHS, THAT LIFT WITH INSECTS AND MAGGOTS. SHE CAN TASTE THE PAPER-THIN LEAVES, cAKED IN DAMP AMBER. THEIR DECAYING EDGES, SLITHERING AGAINST HER BARE SKIN, AS DEAD FERNS GRASP HER FRAME ALONGSIDE AN AUTUMNAL BREEZE. FOR A MOMENT, SHE CLOSES HER EYES. EMBRACE THIS MOMENT. IT’S THE DELICIOUS WHISPER OF MOONLIGHT. THE SMELL OF THE EARTH. THE TASTE OF SOIL AND BLOOD AND BONES, SO COLD AND WET BENEATH HER. THEse are ALL THINGS THAT MAKE HER FEEL, ALIVE. these are all things that make her want.
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
Cyrra gulps down the last of the mulled wine and lets the bronze cup clatter to the ground.
The world swims.
The world is warm and heady.
No.
It’s cold.
She curls into herself, folding over the newly cleaned straw of her bed in the inn she had taken up long-term residence in since awakening from the catacombs and being rescued from the stygian depths by Zayir. Downstairs, lute music trills under the overtones of The Duneworm Inn’s rambunctious patrons. Laughter and yelling; a festal, lively, seething sound that has been her lullaby for the past few weeks or so.
It soothes her.
It reminds her she is not alone.
Except, up here, she is.
Up here she is all alone. And cold, though her body, from throat to knee, is held in the quietive hands of alcoholic reverie, rocking like mother’s hips in the womb to some semblance of sleep—the only reliable form of sleep she has found yet. (Umma and Big-Spear would be scandalized.). Her stark, swimming blue eyes flutter shut, lashes touching the high, august line of cheekbone, both nestling against the abrasive rub of straw. Her breath, spiced and slightly sour, becomes even in time. Deep and rhythmic as she marches like an intrepid pilgrim backwards. Or forwards.
Or neither, for the dream-world has not longitude nor latitude, but is a place without limitation.
And yet…
☉
The darkness is lit by the oily flames of soot-black braziers, spaced in long, even intervals. Enough, that the path ahead seems certain, but the margins around and between are full of the looming, growing dread of unknown. Unknown for some. Too familiar to her. She takes a stiff, militant step forward. The clack of her hoof on the old stone echoes. She squints up, but she cannot see the ceiling, for they are vaulted high, and though they are festooned with the images of Gods and souls in search of Gods—once painted but now flaking bare and dulled—nobody could possibly see the storied carvings in the pitch darkness.
The stale smell of that crypt’s foul air fills her nostrils, blots out any residual perfume of fermented fruit and horsehair. “Hell beacons, come,” she mutters, and the way the charnel silence eats her words makes her stomach lurch. The Viper Slayer gives her head a sharp shake and walks, the tips of her crackled hooves dragging along the dusty stone floor—tshhhh-clack, tshhhh-clack—as she begins her tireless shift.
(It feels like forever.
Another ten years went by, before you appear.)
Cyrra is not used to another in this place, and so, at first, she mistakes the form for another spectre haunting. She acknowledges it with narrowed eye and a curt snort, but then the world of her mind’s own making begins to crack and split at the seams around the visitor. She stops, her head held high, chin tucked towards her chest, in proud, guarded distrust. “How did you get here?” she demands, her voice is iron and venom, aching.
Perhaps it is not the visitor who reveals the weaknesses in her mind-prison willingly, but by simply being, extends to Cyrra the possibility that this hell is not as real as it seems.
Perhaps, the visitor does not see it like this, but to Cyrra’s hard gaze, the faintest trace of sunlight halos the lucid stranger.
I hope this works! Feel free to powerplay the setting of course! @Dune
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
She thought she had reached the nadir of her torment.
She thought she had breathed herself full of charnel air. So full, that the first clear inhale she had taken when she finally surfaced alongside Zayir had almost choked her, rejected as a saltwater fish does fresh. Had heard her fill of the faint tattoo of bony digits on old, cracked stone, like so many warpaths from the nether. Had breathed enough errant, wild whispers, like ghosts making home in jewelled, golden sarcophagi, that her voice had become the sole company she kept until it too died. Had paced herself so weary, that she had found respite and rest against the twists of pale bone and the thick wraps of linen that held preserved forms in chilling abeyance. Had wandered down labyrinthine halls of skulls and ribs and vertebrae, did so for so long, that it seemed to her the whole world must be made of skeletons.
Even now, as she finds purchase on old, familiar ground, she mistakes loose rocks under her feet for the dusty, nauseating crunch of brittle bone and cringes.
(How could ten years feel like a lifetime?
Ten whole years.)
How could it still cling to her, that old stale air, the osseous redolence, the mummified darkness that held no end but instead an endless looping perdition? One step, she is bathed in radiant Solis’ heat, touching each militant, tight swarth of her misused body, coaxing life where there had been such settled lifelessness. And in the very next, she passes back into the far-beneath, cast like a damnable thing into an abyss of mortal, treacherous creation.
She thought she had reached the nadir, but as it turns out, the untangling is the worst part. The moment when she passes through the market and the smell of horsehair, cardamon, chilli and saffron suddenly cede to the stench of grime and subterranean torpor. She jerks her head around to find she is surrounded on all sides by customers, holding bundles of cinnamon sticks to be inspected and merchants, hawk curios from far-lands; by ruddy, sandstone walls and the harsh, white-hot sunlight that fills each crack and crevice contained. But, in the shadows that same sun casts, between walls and under awnings, shape the eyeless sockets and cryptic eternity of her hell.
She works, in restive, frantic ministrations to untie herself. To shake it loose like hair in the morning, and be free, yet.
Cyrra loses herself, now, in the lurching, red-stone of the canyon. She follows the winding, squeezing and opening paths, and they reek of her walking nightmare in the way they seem like a maze made to keep her alone forever. Except she knows, in her heart, that it’s not a maze but a challenge, and she knows the way to the top like the lines of her own bruised and aching knees. She has tread this quandary before. She has faced the dead ends and the dizzying confusion when you think you’ve lost your way. Because the sedimentary stone walls that rise on either side are so tall that you can no longer see the position of the sun, only a thin line of blue, cloudless sky.
The Viper Slayer learned the way to the top by leaving white, chalked marks on the intersections and by racing Zayir, until the openings that lead upwards rather than ever onwards revealed themselves to her.
It is just past high noon when she heaves her body up, sweat slicks and froths along her pale groin and neck, her chest expands in rapid, gulping breaths. She could have flown. Of course she could have, but that had always been cheating. The easy way up. This had been a pilgrimage, and she stands now, a qajiid, forged in sun and labour. She sighs and stretches out her ecru wings, light limning the preened feathers, glinting off her damp form. Scorched earth splays out before her in its beauty of rolling dunes and hard, green succulents; the walled city of the Day Court; below it, the unsealed catacombs, being inspected by scholars as if it hadn’t been their misery for a decade prior.
And beyond that, somewhere, the Traitors bask in good Solis’ rays, like snakes.
Saphira turned away from flames. They were inherently opposite to her being, to everything she was made from and hoped and didn’t hope to return to. They heated the metal which bound her. They destroyed. They meant death. So, it should come as no surprise that she shied away from the bonfire, without knowing exactly what it was for.
She was not one for asking strangers much of anything, but she’d had some wine, and it came to pass that she did ask someone about the bonfire, and she laughed in their face. ”No one is listening,” she cackled, ”and no one ever will be.” But it hurt her to say so, and to think so, as it always did, because she was always hurting, as this was what she believed. Better to be a cynic than to be fooled, she declared, somewhere in silence. Who truly wishes to be miserable but those who invite misery upon themselves?
And so she could not be convinced to step forward and relieve some heavy grief. It could not be freed so simply. She had been cursed - obviously - and from her coat flaked bits of salt, as if she were a walking bit of dried-up sea. Fire had no place being near her, she would shrivel up like a fish on the rocks and die, finally die. And what if - no, no, no. You had your chance and blew it. Try again.
She thought and said all these things, these many many things, but she stood and watched the bonfire anyway, and kept her drink close to her hip. A deep sense of longing pervaded her.
@Katherine || Eldorado || whoever you want || she’s mostly got her summer coat, which is black and should be lit red by the flames, but she’ll be growing in a bit of her winter coat. Her tats are visible too.
The bonfire was easily twice my height. I don’t think I had ever seen a fire so large, or so many of them. They were strung out along the coast like beads on a necklace. They were so captivating, although I find myself at a lack of words to describe how or why. Earlier that night I swam out in the dark water to view the spectacle from the sea. I tried to imagine what a kelpie would think, to see the blazes for the first time. I secretly hoped I might find one, drawn to the light on the cliffs, but as far as I could tell I was alone in the water.
I was drying out and warming up by one of the fires when a boy stumbled up to the warm glow. I could immediately tell he was very drunk. The smell of wine hung in a cloud around him. On closer inspection his lips and legs were stained with the drink, a deep purple-red that reminded me of violent sunsets at their very last moments.
I myself had sipped some wine earlier in the day. I had been curious, and there was no one to stop me. It made me feel dizzy and at the time I had not desired more. But one stolen glance at the boy’s smiling wine-dark lips and I wanted what he had. I wanted his buoyancy, his confidence, his sea-swept ease of being. I wanted to believe it was the wine which gave him these things, and so it could give them to me, too.
I only wanted to be someone other than myself when I was around other people. I think that’s why I was most comfortable alone.
I felt nervous talking to anyone that wasn’t old... but I stubbornly fought such nonsensical emotions. To do anything else would be too much like validation. I cleared my throat, telling myself it was smoke that made it suddenly hard to speak. “Did you know you’re supposed to write down your worries and throw them into the fire?” I had to raise my voice to catch his attention over the crackle of the fire. “I think it’s supposed to... make you feel better. Lighter.” He didn't seem to need any help with that though. I angled my head and returned my gaze to the fire as though consulting its opinion on the matter.
Personally, I found the activity a little childish-- I was only there for the warmth.
Such is life
Short as a day;
Full of strife,
Work, thought, and play
