“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
I know, oh I know, it's a terrible thing I'm doing. Pushing our shoulders together like this-- like we're sisters. Like I'm asking her to stay here when there is this endless hunger gnawing at our stomachs like acid creeping out of the earth's core. Like I'm not looking at the sea, listening to it sing and roar and remind me over and over again there is a world waiting.
And I know--
I know it's terrible that I'm asking her to tell me the names of all her sharp places and how exactly the drops of blood fall from the wounds. Is it like rain? Or is is like ash falling from the sky thick enough to blot out the sun?
All my blood is like ash now and something more like oil when the new moon hangs too low by my window, like it's looking at me and waiting (or is it wanting) something just like the sea is.
Fable thinks it's just pieces of the sea, our sea, leaking though but I know better. I've always known better.
When Antiope stumbles over the words, like her throat has moths pooling in it instead of sound, I understand. There's sharpness in the sound of her voice and maybe a little of sea-salt too. The way I learn against her now doesn't seem so terrible, not when I'm drawing a line of their names through her tangled mane. If I ever lost my children I would want someone to do this, paint my skin in their names over and over again until there was only ink on my skin, black and shining like blood at midnight.
Of course I would devour the world then and no one would be left to braid all the names of my sharpness in my mane.
I'm still braiding names into her mane when I remember a story I heard once back in that old life that's just now starting to creep back in like winter through the broken windows of my soul. It's been long enough that I can't remember the mare's name, but I know that the color of her chains was golden instead of silver. Dandelions, she told me when I would curl into a sliver of moonlight and beg it to dry my tears, are for more than wishing. They can send messages to other worlds too. And I remember taking the seeds she gave me. I remember blowing them out the window and watching them float away like diamond-dust, to what I hoped then was another world.
It's easier than breathing to turn the shore into a field of dandelions, petal-free plumes of seeds waiting for the wind. I can feel it gathering, the storm wind in the distance like it's my heartbeat. Soon it will howl and Fable will tell me it's time to go home so that the sea can't pull me a little deeper in the tide like it always does.
But for now I'm still here doing the terrible thing of leaning against Antiope like I'm begging her to stay even when the winter draft in my bones is starting to scream at me like it's time go. “If you could tell them anything again and you knew there was a way for them to hear it, what would you say?” My ears feel like they are aching against the sound of the sea, and the promise of the howling wind. The answer is too important for me to miss.
It feels, this pause where I've stopped braiding names into her hair, like this is the secret to blocking out the draft and making the fires roar even in the dead of winter.
I'm desperate to learn it. I am hungry.
@Antiope
