[P] you were running through me like water [michael]

[Elena]

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean

Elena’s life is not a series of chapters that flow one to the next, but they are different books entirely. Each with a painstakingly drawn cover, where details are etched so delicately they look like they can come off the page. You run your hand over the cover gently, as if too hard of a touch could ruin it. Excitedly, the book is held in your hands as you eagerly flip it over to find out what this book could possibly be about, but the back is vacant, no words, no drawings, nothing. You are nervous now. Well, maybe you will just open the book, sneak a quick peek at what the book could possibly be about.Looking inside, there are no words written, you flip through the pages more than once, more than twice. You are handed a pen, but you want a pencil, with an eraser sitting at the top, but a pen is all you are given. With shaking hands you begin to write…

She still isn't sure why she left. Maybe she should have thought of this before she pledged herself to the Dusk Court and their goddess, Vespara, before she took up the role of a medic and began collecting herbs and training in healing methods. She has not met enough faces to feel connected to this place yet and every evening as Elena sleeps under the stars (ever since Tunnel, Elena has been unable to sleep beneath trees any more) she thinks, in the morning, I will go back (back where Elena, Hyaline? Paraiso? Windskeep? Woodlands?), but then morning comes and her beloved sun have replaced the mysterious stars she knows so little about. One more day, she thinks, I will stay one more day. There was no point in traveling in Winter anyway, it fogs her mind. With Spring will come clarity, or so she believes.

Marcelo, she thinks when she sees him, or Ori. But for the first time her mother is not the first one to come to mind and her heart breaks a little.

She does not flinch from his company, when perhaps she should. Strangers have given Elena more grief than they have happiness. But maybe it is that smile he offers her, or the smell of foreign waters on his skin, or having someone to talk to on a bleak winter day, Elena welcomes his company.

“Is it wrong to say too many things?” She laughs, only a simple huff of a thing (there is remnants of that old childhood giggle in there yet, but it is sparse) at her own words. “Sorry, that is a terrible answer.” And she truly is apologetic as she turns to look at him with those eyes like early morning frost. “Sometimes I have a thousand thoughts before I open my eyes.” Her head shakes as the eye contact is broken, like waves against the shore before being pulled back out to sea, only to return once more.

“I guess lately I have been thinking about my family, they live far from here, in a land that sometimes I forget is real.” She thinks she has done it again, said too much when she should have only said a little. She bites her bottom lip in silent apology, she has been talking too much.

“What are you doing out here?” She asks, because she thought she would be the only one alone with her thoughts today, trying to drown them. Figuratively, not literally. Elena has not yet reached that point, and when she looks out at the wild waves she cannot fathom the feeling of water drenching her throat and filling her lungs as she paddles uselessly against the water.

Her eyes find him once more. “You look cold.” Blue eyes see the dripping mane, the shivers under his skin. “I’m Elena,” she says, as if her name could offer him some warmth, when she has so little give.  



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
of dusk.