"you seem like a galaxy of stars, just waiting to be explored and loved.”
If I am a rhythm, if I am notes of music strewn across the sky like dewdrops and rain...
If I am a rhythm...
I am one without a beat, a melody, or poetry. There is discord in my bones, and blood, and sharp altos that curl around my heart like spires and thorns. Nothing in me is elegant on its own. Nothing is soothing, or motherly, or sweet as sugar on the tongue. I am brine and blood. I am a drumbeat of thunder echoing on crags and cliffs.
If I have ever been a song, or a poem, or a story without ink blots, I have forgotten the curls my body must make to become it.
But perhaps there is a almost-melody in my steps as I walk through the marble streets of Denocte. Perhaps there is a forgotten stanza of poetry in the bell-chime of hoof on precious stone. Or maybe the almost-music is only in the opal flowers rising in the wake of my shadow like the gardens of the underworld where there is only stone, and darkness, and nothing of blood-red sunlight or rain.
Even the music playing around the bonfires does nothing to settle that discordant sound of my heart. It makes me feel torn, empty, and cracked. And each time I inhale and fill my lungs with jasmine and cedar a bit of me strains to relearn that poetic beat I have forgotten how to gild myself with. I want to be frost on the leaves again, or sunlight dappling the forest floor, or bell-song in the church tree.
I want to be. Oh,
I want to be something else now that I'm in my city again.
And maybe tonight, with the opals at my feet like the underneath risen like a sea and a filigree mask of butterfly dust and diamonds around my face, I might remember how.
It starts with a step lighter than the others and a breath deeper than the shallow ache my lungs have become accustomed too. Someone's poetry fills the forgotten cracks of my own and their violin turns my drumbeat heart into something mellow, something more ember than wildfire, something with a fermented sweetness. I smolder with their music and I let myself fall into the crowd. I dissolve into the heat of mortal skin against my own like I am something as fragile as the rest of the herd.
The tide of this place, of the wholeness of everyone but me, tugs me along into the ebb and flow I have almost-forgotten. My discordant notes start to reshape themselves. The blots of ink scattered across my pages run together and start to paint curls, and dots, and language. All the spires around my heart, and the thorns, start to bloom and leak something other than sea-water and magic.
And when I see the curl of his neck, and the endless eternity in his gaze, and the way the hollow of his throat begs for me to curl myself beneath it like a doe---
When I see him I remember.
I remember how to become music.
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