[P] trees become ghosts

[Nicnevin]

I'LL BE YOUR SWEETEST MOUTH IF YOU LET ME -
watch me reach down my throat, cut my teeth / on a new name. If you open wide / and swallow deep, you can even forget / the taste of all that blood.

Her sighs are like the wind through bare branches. Her hum is like something that I think I used to know but forgot somewhere along the way. Who did you prefer being? And – at the curve of her tail –, I see flowers growing, the pale heads of lilies. I notice the flowers before I notice the sickle-curve hidden beneath long white strands of hair, before I ever think of what could be done with it.

“I don’t think that I’ve been Nicnevin for long enough to say,” I admit, “but I- like flying.” Even when I have been Nicnevin for longer, I do not think that I will be able to say that I prefer her over my first lifetime, no matter how plain; but that is only because I loved the most, in my first lifetime, and, in our endless cycles of death and rebirth, those that you love are the only thing that you cannot take with you. I do not think that I have loved the same way since. After you have learned to lose someone that you loved, I do not think that you can ever love quite the same way again.

But: I have enjoyed this life, for what it is worth. I have loved all its newness, its adventures that have previously been deprived from me – and even standing in the midst of what this strange girl tells me is a graveyard, I cannot help but celebrate it.

There are flowers behind her, in the glass. When she moves, they seem to change to reflect her – and there is this bright splash of light, too, that I find unrecognizable, but my eyes are on the flowers, the pale lilies whose petals change until they are poppies instead, a splash of bloodred in the form of her eyes.

(What I think in the place of shuddering is: even the graveyards here are so beautiful. Anything can be a graveyard if you look hard enough, deep enough into the soil – but ours at home were much plainer, all weathered and overgrown headstones, engravings halfway worn off.)
 
I tilt my head at her, and I ask, “What kind of graveyard?” I don’t know what sort of creature could possibly leave this massive, reflective shards behind as a headstone, but, when I look at them – slanted back, engraved with memories – I can’t help but think the comparison is apt.
 
Her eyes turn back on me. But I do not know what it was. Do you? I do not know if that is important, now, and I can’t tell from her voice if she cares at all; but I know, as something that has lived and died before, that it should matter, at least to me.

There is another lily, white pulse of bloom. I am not looking at it, though. I am looking at her eyes.

“I’m not sure,” My eyes turn to focus on the reflection in the glassy surface behind me. “I know that was a glade where starlings used to roost and raise their young, before it burned.” That was lifetimes ago, of course. That glade doesn’t even exist as ashes, now. The forest is unchanged between my lifetimes; it is also unspeakably different. “And this place, I don’t know, but-“ and here I stop, for a moment, to think, and then say, “maybe it was something greener.” I don’t know enough of this world to say.

I cannot imagine a forest of green. In my head, all forests are gold, gold, gold - trapped in a perpetual state of near-decay, but never quite allowed the luxury necessary to succumb. Still. I know that outsiders have green forests, at least in spring, and sometimes even in the other season, too (it all depends on the type of tree); and I wonder if this place was ever ordinary, or if it has always been so strange, the sprout-and-bloom of some incomprehensible seed.

It is rarer to see something created than killed, I think; rarer to find a newborn than a corpse.

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@Danaë || <3 || aline dolinh, "unbecoming extraterrestrial" 
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