« don't die so far from the sea »
Yet here you are. Not old enough to be dead.
Perhaps not old enough to be dead, no
but old enough to know death, and the way
it is the
one
memory
he
carries
with him from
all
his
lives.
The end is always so clear to him. That is how it has always been, for Orestes, since his people came from the sea and asked the land to love them and the mother asked him to carry her memories for as long as his Soul lived.
He wants to say, I know the way death clings to you, because it clings to me too.
It is his last life.
The wild in him rises to meet the wild in her. In the red canyon, where he had come to learn the history of his new people, everything he meant to bury reemerges. There are so many things dying within him, including the memory of the sea; he cannot smell it here; he cannot even recollect the salt, the brine, the fish. He smells the rot of her black moss and her skin and feels the heat of a proud god. Orestes wonders if it is all a test; and if he were another man, he might even wonder if it were all real.
No magic has abandoned me. It came here too. He knows too much about magic that is not meant to be, in the way there is the memory of another magic rotting in his blood, in the way his limbs tremble with the desire to become something else and cannot. The hawk is above, the shadow beneath, and there is something that spirals within him in the same way.
What does it feel like to be—
An eternity passes—
—and then another.
He aches with all the things he wishes to become and cannot.
Lost?
Orestes almost laughs, but he knows pain too well now to let it defeat him. It feels like—
it feels like—
it feels like—
A straining, a seeking, a longing, a wanting, an aching—
A reaching, a failing, a falling—
A loving, a leaving—
An unraveling—
“It feels like an unfinished poem sounds.” Tragic, bewildering, and maybe a little beautiful. Orestes cannot help himself—he steps forward again, and the space he had allowed to grow between them is again eliminated. Perhaps her rotting magic calls to his dead magic—perhaps it is the way the sun makes him feel strong even as his heart feels weak. Perhaps it is the way there is an echo of something unfinished, or forgotten, in her twilight gaze and prayer-like words. He aligns his shoulder with hers, so that they nearly touch and his neck twines about her own, a hairsbreadth from touching.
But he does not touch her. No. Orestes does not. He looks at her from the corner of a sea-blue eye and thinks of how his living magic, his sun-given magic, boils within his blood like a star ready to become a black hole. They are almost touching, the way her presence opens a void in him—
Well, that feels a little like being lost, too.
@Thana / speaks / notes: text text
☀︎