take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

There is a story about how a girl became a tree. 

She had wanted to touch the sky and so the gods had made her a bird, with silver wings that glistened in sunlight and shone in moonlight. She flew amongst the clouds, and she would swear she could touch that endless blue sky with the tips of her feathers. If you asked her what it felt like she would say it was like freedom. 

But oh she missed the ground, the solidness beneath her feet, the steadiness. So the gods made her a rabbit, with fur of snow white, and eyes of green like the grass. She scampered through the underbrush and slept in the fallen leaves. If you asked her what it smelled like she would say like when the seasons change. 

Those green eyes had looked to the sky though, with the ground beneath her feet and she wished for the freedom it provided her. She went to the gods once more. “I want the sky and the earth.” She had told them with her voice as sure as ground and as airy as sky. “You cannot have both child, you must choose,” they had told her. But a girl of both worlds did not believe this so easily. She thought for a moment before an idea struck her. “So then make me a tree, so that my roots make always know the firmness of the earth, but still the coolness of the sky, and that the rest of me may live in between.” She had said and the gods gave it to her. 

Elena had sat under a giant weeping willow with her mother as she told her this story. The same weeping willow her mother would be buried under not a few months later. “Is this her?” She had asked in lilting soprano tones. “Maybe,” her mother had responded. “Do you think so?” She had asked and Elena, always so eager to believe the stories she was told had nodded. “Perhaps we should give her a name then,” she says, looking to Elena with blue eyes that one day Elena would gain from her. “Ava,” Elena says, quickly, much too quickly. “Lets name her Ava.” Her mother nods. “Ava. Life.” 

Elena has been fire since she has been young. Since she had stood hot and tall against the Snow Prince at such a young age, desperate to protect her cousin and her home against his wicked chill. Elena had been so unaware of her own bravery that day, or how Aletta had thought the child had blazed, and how she had admired the golden girl’s bravery. But today Elena feels anything but brave. The memory of him prods her like a thorn. Elena must always remember that she is glass, a thing to be sculpted and broken. After all, she lives in a world full of stone throwers. 

For a heartbeat she forgets about him. (Maybe it is that easy.) As the bonfires surround her and the ocean accompany the crackle and flicker of the flames. The ocean has become her weakness. It croons to her the way the mountains once had. Silver blue eyes look almost amber in the glow of the fire light. Place your worries into the fire. She sighs, because she thinks, if it were that easy, maybe the fire that sits inside her, that is reflected in the marking on her shoulder, would have burned them all up long ago.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me