[P] I dream in blue [tenebrae]

[Elena]

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

It feels like she is always drifting now, a brittle gold leaf caught within the push and pull of dark currents. Everything is different now, changed, and yet somehow same. This pain in her chest is solely hers, carefully hidden and tucked away from prying eyes, a task that is decidedly difficult for a face as expressive as hers. But she tries anyway because this ache is her fault, her burden, hers to bear.

She keeps it safe like a secret.

Elena was so tired of feeling empty—of feeling sorrow.

She was young, but heartache had become a constant companion, carving out space in her chest so that when she woke in the middle of the night, it was with short gasps, the monsters of her dreams still lurking in the shadows of the land.

She would have died from that love, Lilli had said, and she knew that it was somehow true.

She would have died from that love, but back then, back then she had been okay with this.

She had loved the cruelty in him, the sweet agony, and if he had been the dagger she died upon, so be it.

She should have more of a sense of self-preservation.

Elena is lost in the world of fast turns and intimate relationships while she stands stationary with no one beside her. Imaginary flames taste her skin jumping and arching against the roll of her hips and the sway of her curves. She is unaware of the fire she casts against the pale man, unaware of his eyes upon her because she has never been aware when others watch her.

(In the openness of a meadow, behind the thick tree line, to the side of a boulder, in the blaze of a snowstorm, they have watched her.)

Her blood feels ignited, it runs hot like she has been fed the fire that burns not far in the distance. She can feel the smoke fill her lungs, it singes against her nerves, and blaze her soul. And it is there buried beneath her skin as she darts blue eyes to the man who had watched her as he greets her. “Thank you for the welcome,” she says. “It is my first time here in Denocte,” she admits, she feels suddenly so warm even as the sun edges closer to the horizon, falling with grace from the sky.

Her name he asks for, a simple request, something to be expected, but Elena for once finds the act mundane, too simple for what she feels within that golden breast of hers. “I’ll tell you,” she says and there is something feverish buried beneath her tongue that arches up to meet her lips in a smile. “But only after you dance with me,” she says because tonight she doesn't feel like Elena, she feels bold and brazen. She feels like fire, like flames. And fire cannot stay contained in a wide open space. It longs to twist, to turn, to leap—

To ignite.

She moves between the boy and the dancers, she can feel the music writhing in her veins like a butterfly cupped in childish hands. “Please?” It is a question, a simple, girlish plea. “This night,” she says and she looks upwards to the first of the stars that shyly appear from a sky made of blue and fire. “It is going to be far too beautiful to waste sitting idly by,” she says in that way that is so innately Elena, bright like the daytime sun she was named for. “What’s the harm?” She asks him. “We’re only strangers.”

He had been a stranger once.

And him.
And him as well.
And he too.

What was the harm?
Only strangers.

They were only strangers.



* 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.

@Tenebrae