[P] while we're dying inside [toulouse]

[Elena]

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

“Come here Elaina. Come here and tell me about your scars…or leave.” He had said to the girl with golden skin. It is a challenge, she knew it when he uttered those words to her. She shakes under his touch, but she stays never the less. “Are you all alone?” He asks, and she says yes. Elena will come to replay this moment in her mind a hundred times (a thousand even) because she wonders, in the way we all play our worst decisions like a bad movie, if things would have been different if she had lied, if she hadn't stayed. Was he like a vampire? Only need be in invited in. 

“Are you all alone?” Marcelo had asked the same question years earlier, back when Elena had been small, newly orphaned, her eyes itchy from tears. 

On this gray winter day in Winter, when Elena feels lonely wandering through the lands of Novus. It is then they come, as they always do, they onslaught her, assaulting her heart until she has no choice but to listen. The way she would spend hours just trying to make Alvaro offer her even the tiniest crinkle of a smile. It is Cherish gathering the foals of Windskeep for a story. Valerio, appearing before them like the guardian he was. Marcelo’s worried glances as Elena tries to balance across a log. Ori’s laughter, kicking up snow. Altair as he presses his forehead against her own, silent promises on his tongue if she just gave him her heart, and Elena so stubbornly refusing to do so. “I hope you aren't afraid of the dark,” he had said and her skin had shuttered. Aerwir pleading with her to just tell him what was wrong. And then it is Lilli, because, in the end it was always Lilli. The one face she had been able count on, a more constant than her own parents had been. 

She aches.

Guilt hollows out her stomach and suddenly she feels thirsty. So thirsty. She banishes the memories and lets them sink into the snow, to melt with spring. Why was she doing this to herself? She had come to Novus for a new start, not only for herself, but for Lilli too. Elena, despite the years she has aged is still so foolish. She needs to leave this behind, if only for a little while. 

So Elena, with no where else she can go, she goes there once more. 

The shoreline roars and drags. And Elena fidgets in the sand. She isn't sure where to go from here. Elena has never been a lover of the ocean, has not sought out its salty waters like so many do, but she finds herself here all the same. She remembers being small, begging her father to take her to the ocean, and no she is here and Elena isn't quite sure what to do next. Her future looks, for the first time in her life, blank and devoid of anything. She wonders if this is what it is like to feel peace.

But then, Elena, why do we find you pacing the sand as if you wanted anything but a blank canvas set before you?



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

@toulouse