and i must pour forth a river of words
or i shall suffocate.
or i shall suffocate.
S
he can feel her lungs trembling like a butterfly taking flight when he answers her. And every look, every whisper of his voice, and touch of his muzzle to her neck, and every glint of his golden antlers against the firelight — it’s all so much like a song she has not yet learned the rhythm of. But she wants to — oh, how she wants to learn to be the shy, wild thing in the wood, looking at the world lit in light for the first time, blinking her eyes against the brightness after so long spent in the dark. She wants the softness of discovery, of growing.It feels as though there is sunlight in her smile, when this time she is the one to move forward and press her lips to his cheek like a daring sparrow. Only for a moment, only long enough to feel the velvet of his skin and memorize the way he smells both like the woods and the meadows, and then she steps back.
"I will," the promise is a sigh on her lips, sealed in heartbeats and breaths. For you, anything, her eyes are whispering as she closes them against the firelight. And she sees the cave again — their cave — in her mind when she does, all glistening moon-bright waters and echoes that went on forever, and ever, and ever, like the cave was holding all their secrets for them.
Her notebook spills open again, this time to a blank page (one not ruined by her wandering pen’s aimless track). And as she writes in it, she whispers her promise aloud to him:
do solemnly swear
to always
be waiting for Leonidas,
at the cave where we met,
when he looks for me there."
And, as quickly as she can, she signs it with a sunflower growing up alongside her words.
The page she tears carefully from the seam, and holds it out between them like a dandelion offering. "Promise you’ll think of me any time you see a sunflower?" she makes him swear, when she presses the page into his grasp.
She is still smiling, and her heart is still singing like a dove in the morning, when she leaves him there beside the statue. And when she looks back to him, it seems now as if the statue is laughing and singing, too, and not screaming or sobbing like it was before.
{ @Leonidas "speaks" notes: }
