"There is not enough air in the room but you are breathing."
Someday she will ask him things like: how, why, and who. Someday she will tuck their noses together in the tall-grass (that she's made into pearls and petals and golden dirt) and beg him to whisper of all the details. Moonlight will turn their skin into tones of silver and sometimes purple when the clouds sail low across the mountains. Shadows will paint tomes of blackness in the places where they touch. Like ink on paper their skin, their words, their love will become stories touched long after they turn to rot.
Someday.
But for now there is this tension between them. Two things that are both pulling hard like chain and pushing quick like wind that wants only to rush, and dance, and sing through a new-birch forest. Isra still doesn't know if she wants to be chain, or storm, or beast in the belly of the earth. All she knows is that there is this thing in her that is still so sad he left, and so grateful that she didn't touch him with blood on her lips.
Maybe that's why she loves him, for the way they each break and break, over and over again, until the world is nothing more than glass pieces cracking around them.
Maybe it's easy to love him because she's certain that he might leave again. Someday.
“I am glad.” She says. It's the truth and it's so much warmer than the pearls bouncing against their legs. Warmer than his winter skin beneath her lips and his icy huff of breath. She thinks she wasn't supposed to hear the way it sounds like breaking. The pearls turn to daises easier than the knife that started all of this once did.
At the water's edge her wild children are dancing across the bone-white shore. There are water willows and iris woven around their ears and their horns like crowns. Isra wonders what they are gods of this time. It's never queens, never royalty. It's always more, always everything. Fable is in the lake blowing bubbles for her twins to play in. Some part of Isra longs to be as carefree and as gentle as her sea-dragon.
Between the two of them she knows that she is more monster.
“Would you like to meet my children?” She says.
They will love you. She doesn't say. But it's in her eyes, it's always in her eyes, the shine of breaking.
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