and i must pour forth a river of words
or i shall suffocate.
or i shall suffocate.
I
f Maret only knew the way the rest of the night would play out, oh, then she might have turned then and gone back to her room.She might have gone back to the few stray sunflowers that had managed to stay alive in the flowerbed outside her window, to all the unfinished poems waiting like promises on her desk. She might have hugged her fathers and told them how much she loved them, and would miss them, and how terribly afraid she had been when she thought she had lost them and herself.
She might have trembled when she heard the music, and seen the fireflies leading her to the water (the same way they would lead her later to the ghosts.)
But she does not know. Oh, Maret does not know how terribly things can hurt when she misplaces her trust in them.
She would learn.
But for now she is only laughing as she feels the wings of the fireflies flutter against her skin. And she is leaning into them like sunlight, like warmth, like growth when she arches her neck and dances a circle alongside Elena. And she does not stop to wonder if she is a ghost or a girl, or if Elena is real, or if the strangers watching them and smiling are smiling because they, too, are ghosts who know all the things she does not.
“My fathers taught me,” she said, when she leans against Elena’s golden shoulder to catch her breath. “Eros told me once that it was the way Aion danced that made them fall in love.” It does not feel as strange as it once did to call her parents by name. And Maret tells herself it is a sign that she is older now, that they should come so easily; but if she were being honest with Elena, with herself, it is because she has yet to know who she is when she is apart from those things in life that she trusts.
Their steps are slower now, gentler, kinder — Maret flicks an ear towards the girl and together they gather even as the fireflies gather around them.
She would laugh, if she were not so terribly afraid of scaring them all away.
“I always thought of fire as something destructive,” she whispers. “How can something be both good and bad at one, how can it destroy as easily as it gives life?”
How can the world be so full of opposites?
She thinks she can see the answer there in Elena’s eyes. Later she will write about it, the painful duality of a soul, the sparks that can thaw as easily as consume. Later, later, later —
{ @Elena "speaks" notes: <3 }
