[P] I am in love with my sadness [date]

[Elena]

They had called her the Gilded Cecilia when she had been blind, when she had wandered, not speaking, they had thought her to maybe be deaf, or mute. Maybe it fit, the way she was like living gilt. But her vision came back, in blue eyes and blinding sunlight.

She rolls a delicate shoulder, but a warm smile stretches easily across her face. Elena moves through the archway and out into where she would be meeting her new friend. A blind date, Elena laughs inside her heart at the thought. You would think she would have had enough of dates to last, but Elena will forever make room in her heart, an infinity of space.

Elena looks to each of the candles on the tables. It flickers and dances like summer had never really ended and the sun was not setting. “Sereia,” she says when she hears her name from the girl’s lips. “Oh, but I didn't bring anything for you,” she says in a moment of panic as she hesitantly unwraps the gift, excitement blossoming in her belly. She feels Sereia’s own excitement skipping like rocks on a lake and it feels good to share an emotion with another. “Thank you,” she says, and she reaches over in the form of a hug. “I owe you.” It is a promise of both a gift and that this would not be the last time they met.

“I think I have given up my research for now.” It is a half hearted statement. “There was a monk, and now there is not.” She summarizes the story, speaks a bullet point— There was a monk and now there is not—because nowhere in her does she have the words to articulate the story that unfolded. The dancing, the fires, the lake, the love, the water, the falling, the child. It is too much to tell a stranger. “He’s gone.” The last bullet point, the conclusion she never hoped to write but had been inevitable from the first moment they danced in the embers of the bonfire. “I am grateful we had the chance to meet at all again,” she says, and in truth, she is grateful for the beauty of the place, though a little uncomfortable by all the unbroken love. “What were you searching for in the library that day? Did you find it?”

picture by cannon <3
@Sereia