Isra and the goodbye ache
“So it’s true, when all is said and done,
grief is the price we pay for love.”
“So it’s true, when all is said and done,
grief is the price we pay for love.”
T
here are times when she remembers what it feels like to be made of sorrow, and rain, and misery instead of flesh or bone. It had a weight, all that heaviness, like stones piling up in her soul and bits of earth pulling her down into the rot, and the blackness. She remembers the salt of it, the brine, the way seaweed could form itself into chains thicker and sharper than steel. But now, beneath that, Isra knows what it is to feel like magic, like danger, like a wildcat.
And when Marisol shifts, for a moment no more than a beat of her heart, Isra remembers. Perhaps if she were not used to watching for the cracks that bloom so lovely, so perfectly across the planes of Marisol she would not have seen it. But it's there like a solar flare reflected across the surface of the sea. It looks like rage, and sorrow, and heartbreak. It looks like it wants to devour her in the same way the sea has ever wanted to.
Her own magic and sea-touched wildness answers back. It's a flash of dark blue tide, of monsters lurking beneath the pearl-white crest of a wave. When the thing in Marisol that leaks brine and weed instead of sorrow looks at it the thing in Isra curls its lip back and flashes sharp shark teeth. There is sorrow in her, always, but now it's tainted and poisoned by war, and suffering, and hunger.
And then they are heartbreak again, god-girls looking at each other with a different kind of hunger and violence. Isra does not step closer when the rusty pain of Marisol's voice makes her shiver like a touch instead of sound. In her chest, beneath all the cracks and scars and salt-water, her heart is screaming to beg forgiveness, to say I loved him first and I was lost.
Even if she could take it back (she doesn't want to) she would never give up the two fierce sea-stars thriving inside her. So she only lifts her head, like there is something more than a bone sword hanging from her brown, and says with all the coarse of a storm-sea (and all the violence), “Eik”. She says nothing else.
Isra knows she cannot share here all the ways in which she loves-- likes pieces of a puzzle that fit closer than any root has ever fit in the dirt. Nor can she say, I loved him by the snow-light and you by the sea-torn land. She knows with a terrible knowing, the same way she knew that she had become a waiting weapon, that there is nothing more to say.
They are too fierce, too wild, too full of gnawing grinding teeth for words, words, words. “I'm sorry.” Her heart quivers like a dying thing at the feel of the words slamming against her teeth. All the cracks of her yawn open like beasts, like lions, like chasms at the bottom of the sea.
“I'll always be sorry.” When she walks away, and her dragon howls out a sorrowful dirge as he flies home, Isra cannot help but look back one time. In that look there is nothing of good-bye. There is only a wanting she fears will never die, never fade, never stop hurting.
@Marisol | "speaks" | notes: <3
