there was scarcely a hut to receive this,

I think love and hate belong to the same vein.

There are days when I visit the Terrastella hospital, to listen to the medics as they speak, as they save or dispose of tattered lives. I sit in the back of lectures and the one that comes to me in the dead of winter is when, on a cool marble slab, they dissected a heart. As the heart beats, it utilises a circulatory system to pump blood through the body. Blood enters two large veins; the inferior and superior vena cava, where it then empties blood with very little oxygen into the right atrium.

The anatomy of the thing that keeps us alive was dissected in cool, scientific intonations. Apathetic. Distanced. Superior and inferior vena cava. 

And then: the pulmanory vein empties oxygen-rich blood, from the lungs into the left atrium.

Blood leaves the heart from the right side. From the pulmonic valve, into the pulmonary artery and then the lungs. On the left side, it departs through the aortic valve, into the aorta and to the body. This is a repeated pattern, they say, as hard and simple fact. 

Is that how your heart stopped, Capella? Was it the right or left side that went out first? Those same doctors—I recognise the one who, as a young man, delivered the news that you would die—listened as your lungs filled with liquid, and said in that clipped tone (now dead, now compassionate) there is nothing more we can do.

I can feel something changing in me. I walk through Terrastella’s snow-choked streets. It is too early to be awake; but I cannot sleep without dreaming of a sky full of the eyes of dying gods. I went to look for you there, i cannot help but think. I stare up at a cloudy dawn-before-dawn, where everything is the blue of veins beneath the skin, where even the air seems thick with it—

And even now,

Capella.

The brightest star within a constellation.

She is not there. 

She is never there.

And I can feel something changing in me; a love that twists into hate. My breath feels constricted in my lungs. 

I am the only one awake—

or am I the only one dreaming?

The streets are empty; they feel haunted, and perhaps that is because I am haunting them. 

I could venture to Susurro Fields, or stand on the edge of the Praistigia Cliffs, but I know the feeling will not abate. And so when I stop my aimless wandering, it is in a courtyard that during summer months must be a beautiful garden. The fountain in the center is frozen and the trees leafless; the grey branches scratch against the pre-lit dawn. 

I stop there, staring.

Snow begins to fall soft and quiet. As it does, I realise I am not, in fact, the only one awake. But I do not break the silence. I do not say anything to the girl with a crow’s head that looks more like a statue than the living.

@Maybird