[AW] nothing gold can stay

[Marisol]

"And when I touch you in each of the places we meet in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying and resurrected. When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life, in each place and forever."

The girl with snow-white hair comes to visit me every morning. I forget her name, but not her face; we eat breakfast together every day, and a painting of her hangs in my kitchen. I am always curious about the signature in the corner, which I can never quite read clearly. It is a very good painting. It looks just like her: so much like her, in fact that sometimes when I wake up I wonder if it isn’t a window through which she’s staring at me, or an enchanted paper rather than a real work of art. She has bright amber eyes that remind me of an owl’s. Her face is mottled in gray and deep brown. Her lips are coated in black. 

But it is her hair I always think of first—long, snow-white hair, tied up in gold ribbons, twisted into careful plaits—because it is the last thing to leave when she closes the front door behind her.

Sometimes she brings another girl with her. A tan one with bright blue eyes and wings where her ears should be. This one is good at smiling, good at being chipper, but I don’t think I know her as well. Today is not one of those times. 

It must be summer; light leaks in through the windows. Dust swirls in the air. My bed is unmade. We take our spots at the table. She sits across from me, and I can see the sunlight caught in her eyelashes; the glint of sharp teeth in her half-open mouth; the strands of hair, pale as seashells, that drift around her face.

“…Mom,” she says softly. She almost sounds afraid.

“Do you remember—“

---

He falls asleep with his face in my hair. I have been bad at cutting it lately, and I think this has something to do with it. I would like to make my husband’s life as soft as possible. He had mentioned once—it was not even a real complaint—that the way I had cut it made it grow out spiny, that it would scratch his cheek sometimes in sleep, and now I cannot bring myself to cut it again, not as long as he is here with me.

Everyone else is asleep, but I cannot close my eyes. This is when the panic hits me. The blood-freezing fear. I look at my family, dozing here perfectly still, doused in moonlight, and instead of feeling peaceful, or soothed at the sight of it, I am stricken with a fear so deep I can’t even breathe. 

My chest seizes. I try not to gasp; I know it would wake them up. But to be alive is painful. I feel a burn at the edges of my eyes. Tears threaten me with a silent sting. Acid climbs up into my throat as the feeling surges past the place it should sit in my stomach, and when I breathe it is less an inhale than a stutter, caught in four or five different places before I manage to pull it in fully.

He stirs; I go deer-still. I feel the soft whoosh of his exhale stirring my hair, the flutter of his lashes pressed up against my shoulder. The warmth of his body, still spilling out today’s store of sunlight. 

But he is still asleep. 

I am almost asleep, too, by the time hours later when I hear him whisper: I must go home.

---

I try not to think about it. We plant apple seeds in a new square around the orchard, Hilde and Aeneas trailing behind us and bickering, hitting each other with their still-soft wings. 

I watch him out of the corner of my eye. He walks just beside me, shoulder to shoulder, like we did that last time so many months ago. Today the light is thin and gray. The sun has been suffused through miles of rainclouds before it reaches us, tiny specks on a huge earth. It’s not quite cold yet, but winter is threatening us, peering over the horizon of this silty sky. I don’t want things to change. I want it to be fall forever.

The air smells like rain; underfoot the soil is still damp, and the petrichor mixes with the smell of crushed leaves. We say nothing. What is there to say?

Behind me, Hilde laughs, clear and bright as a bell.

I kiss his cheek. I think we both smile. 

---

He stays with us most of the time. But he is still king, and there are still things to be taken care of in the desert, and today he has left after breakfast to go check on things, saying to the kids conspiratorially that they must take care of me, and telling me, with his eyes, that he will be back soon enough.

The second he’s out of sight, gone through the gates of the city, I bolt upstairs. My throat is too dry to swallow against. I breeze past all the servants, the guards, the housekeepers, and into the little office he has set up inside our castle. I am a maniac. I rifle through books; I tear open letters. I pull out every drawer in the desk. Candle flames stutter, threatening to blow out. The other guests must be able to hear the clattering, but I don’t care. 

My body is gone. All that’s left is panic.

I find it tucked in a notebook whose pages have been warped and stained by water. Has it been two years? I read my own letter, the ink half as black as it used to be. All this to say: if there is a day you need to come home, Terrastella’s shores are open.

I hate myself for writing it.

---

“Mom,” she says softly. She almost sounds afraid. The air is thinned by sunlight, by silence, by plumes of pale dust. Breakfast sits between us, untouched. “Do you remember—“

“Always,” I murmur. 

We eat.

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