IF I WENT TO HELL WOULD I
care, would it really be different from heaven? No / I don't know what I'm saying, these aren't my answers. / I don't care about being alive -☼
I am a long way from anything.
Most of the time, Seraphina resents herself.
She has always been an envious creature, deeper down than she would like to admit, but, lately, her envy has felt like something ravenous, eating a hole in her chest. She cannot look at her own face without thinking of dying. She cannot look at her tight braids without thinking of Viceroy, her blade-silver skin without thinking of the war she was thrown into as a child, the soft scarring around her throat without thinking of a collar, the sword at her hip without death, the swell of her sides without the god that abandoned her over and over again-
She has spent her entire life longing to be something else. Anything else, perhaps. Most of the time, she finds herself longing to be something softer, quieter, kinder; more beautiful, even, or at least sympathetic. There is nothing especially beautiful about the way that she has fallen apart entirely, self-destructed like a dead sun – only sharp edges and gnarls, a tangle of thorns. She doesn’t want to be pitied, but she wants to be pitiable. She doesn’t want anyone to see her, but she longs for someone to save her, but-
She always finds herself here, twitching like a fly in a spiderweb. Sometimes she wishes that she could be destructive, or angry, or, at the very least, that she could ache and ache and ache in a way that is useful, shed her skin and become something stronger from it – but she never does. Each quiet failure only brings her a bit lower, drags her further into the quagmire of her own stagnation.
There had been moments, when she’d thought-
(the flash of one set of pale eyes or another, the cadence of a soft voice, her form in the library, her lips formed into the shape of a laugh that she know longer remembers how to create, simple peace, a throne room that wasn’t in ashes, her hooves like charcoal half-moons as she step-step-steps up to the battlefield, catches sight of a form that is like quicksilver, like a blade, like her-)
but she knows better than to think that they matter, because they didn’t stay. Nothing stays; it only lingers like a hungry dog, and she is left to drag it about.
(She watches the woman, quietly envious, as she submerges herself in the Oasis. Hadn’t she promised herself years ago, after she’d nearly drowned in that labyrinthian maze, that she’d learn to swim? Another longing that she’d never managed to follow through; she would still drown. What had she ever hoped for? The desert would always bind her like a shackle and tie her down on solid ground. She would never, even for a moment, be free of it.)
She has never been good at this – at any of this -, but, when she looks at the other woman, she recognizes her own agony like a tangible thing. You look like me, she says, in a voice that sounds as though it has forgotten to speak. It is unkind, but not in the way that cruelty is; it is unkind mostly by omission, by the absence of warmth, and impatient. This is the first time I have been a woman in weeks.
And oh, Seraphina knows what it means to be- not yourself. Not woman. Not anything at all.
(She has not felt like a living thing in years. Most mornings she wakes up choking on her own breath, sure that she is bleeding out again, that this time, finally-)
“What were you,” she says, in a voice as quiet and throaty as the grave, “instead?”
@Boudika || <3 || alice notley, "fill out questionnaire for good"
Sera || Eresh
care, would it really be different from heaven? No / I don't know what I'm saying, these aren't my answers. / I don't care about being alive -☼
I am a long way from anything.
Most of the time, Seraphina resents herself.
She has always been an envious creature, deeper down than she would like to admit, but, lately, her envy has felt like something ravenous, eating a hole in her chest. She cannot look at her own face without thinking of dying. She cannot look at her tight braids without thinking of Viceroy, her blade-silver skin without thinking of the war she was thrown into as a child, the soft scarring around her throat without thinking of a collar, the sword at her hip without death, the swell of her sides without the god that abandoned her over and over again-
She has spent her entire life longing to be something else. Anything else, perhaps. Most of the time, she finds herself longing to be something softer, quieter, kinder; more beautiful, even, or at least sympathetic. There is nothing especially beautiful about the way that she has fallen apart entirely, self-destructed like a dead sun – only sharp edges and gnarls, a tangle of thorns. She doesn’t want to be pitied, but she wants to be pitiable. She doesn’t want anyone to see her, but she longs for someone to save her, but-
She always finds herself here, twitching like a fly in a spiderweb. Sometimes she wishes that she could be destructive, or angry, or, at the very least, that she could ache and ache and ache in a way that is useful, shed her skin and become something stronger from it – but she never does. Each quiet failure only brings her a bit lower, drags her further into the quagmire of her own stagnation.
There had been moments, when she’d thought-
(the flash of one set of pale eyes or another, the cadence of a soft voice, her form in the library, her lips formed into the shape of a laugh that she know longer remembers how to create, simple peace, a throne room that wasn’t in ashes, her hooves like charcoal half-moons as she step-step-steps up to the battlefield, catches sight of a form that is like quicksilver, like a blade, like her-)
but she knows better than to think that they matter, because they didn’t stay. Nothing stays; it only lingers like a hungry dog, and she is left to drag it about.
(She watches the woman, quietly envious, as she submerges herself in the Oasis. Hadn’t she promised herself years ago, after she’d nearly drowned in that labyrinthian maze, that she’d learn to swim? Another longing that she’d never managed to follow through; she would still drown. What had she ever hoped for? The desert would always bind her like a shackle and tie her down on solid ground. She would never, even for a moment, be free of it.)
She has never been good at this – at any of this -, but, when she looks at the other woman, she recognizes her own agony like a tangible thing. You look like me, she says, in a voice that sounds as though it has forgotten to speak. It is unkind, but not in the way that cruelty is; it is unkind mostly by omission, by the absence of warmth, and impatient. This is the first time I have been a woman in weeks.
And oh, Seraphina knows what it means to be- not yourself. Not woman. Not anything at all.
(She has not felt like a living thing in years. Most mornings she wakes up choking on her own breath, sure that she is bleeding out again, that this time, finally-)
“What were you,” she says, in a voice as quiet and throaty as the grave, “instead?”
@Boudika || <3 || alice notley, "fill out questionnaire for good"
Sera || Eresh
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
