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

[Elena]

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

She had not been certain why she had followed her father out to the lake so late at night, except had had asked and she had never been the daughter to turn down such things. She was a quiet girl back then, content to walk amongst the tulips and learn the beauty of Windskeep, but she had never wanted for more. She had never desired any kind of power of attention outside the gentle love of her family. Never wanted for more.

Still, she loves her father and respects him perhaps more than anyone she has ever known.

So when he had asked, she had followed.

She had walked silently beside him in the cool night air, careening her neck back to look at him with amber eyes, facing forward with a roll of her shoulders. She startles then when her father asks her a question. “What do you want to be, Elena?” He had asked her that night.

That same night Elena had no answer to give.

She could live a hundred nights and not feel the way she did now.

Life thrilled through her, raced through her veins,

Elena is foolish, without a doubt, it goes hand in hand with her brazenness.

And oh Michael, how she believes you. You could tell her the sky was falling and she would scurry for cover without glancing up. She looks at him offering him everything she can in this moment. ‘I don't know you,’ she thinks and for once it is a beautiful thing to not know. She decides in that moment she doesn't want to know, to know him other than the blonde man that had gone to the sea on a cold day.

And yet—
‘This cant be the last time I see you,’ she thinks in the same breath, in the same heartbeat. “Don’t say that,” she says because she cant bare to hear something like pity in his voice. That cant be how she knows him today, tonight.

Michael doesn't know if he likes Elena, but the sunshine child has already given herself to him and promised to make him her friend because he had risen from the sea just as her parents had so long ago. He smells like salt and mystery and her heart races comfortably in her golden breast.

‘You don't seem old enough for a granddaughter…or for centuries.’ Is what she thinks but has no time to say. The mystery of Michael moves further down her spine.

“They say a serpent tricked Eve into biting the apple and in doing so doomed us all and that is why we fear them.” She says with a story-telling smile. ‘Is that what you fear, Michael, do you fear we are all doomed here?’ But she doesn't ask this this. ‘Do you think we were supposed to be here at all, Michael? Or was it just an accident, a mistake that cant be corrected?’ She bites her tongue instead of speaking. Instead those longing blue eyes reach out to beyond the ocean. “Do you think there is a place out there? Beyond this? How do we know here is where we are supposed to be? And not there?” There. The ever wondrous place Elena never seems quite able to reach. “Would you go there, if you could?”

Would you?
Would she?

Would you?

Michael,

Would 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.

@Michael