She is watching the ghost-foal dance when it begins.
She is watching him dance, and she is laughing, and she is not understanding the way her lungs start to tremble and her heart begins to flutter like a thread unraveling in the wind. She is following after him and trying to dance alongside him, and with every step she feels lighter—
with every step her skin shivers—
with every step she feels as though she is slipping away—
She does not notice at first the way he is turning grey instead of silver, or how his hooves begin to tap out a rhythm on the grass when before there was only the hiss of mist. She does not notice the color leaching from the world (how can she, when he is the brightest thing around, framed by all those fireflies?) She does not notice until it is too late.
The cry is strangled in her throat when she looks down and sees only mist, and fog, and smoke. And then, oh then she understands the terrible, weightless feel of her stomach, the way her steps had felt far more graceful than she had ever been capable of. And only then does she feel the cold once again settle into her not-there-veins, as the veil of ice she has always worn comes crashing back down.
“Maeve!” she cries, and in her voice she can hear the warnings of the stranger from before. “I — I don’t know!” she rushes back to the younger girl’s side, presses in tightly against her side (and she tries, oh she tries to not notice the way their legs are tangling together, the way their mist-bodies are blending into one, the way her body feels less and less like her own—).
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t want this—“
But there is no time for apologies. Not now, not when their time is being leeched from them like sand in an hourglass — and hourglasses never did last for very long.
Before she knows it she is running — can it be called running, when her hooves never seem to touch the ground? When she cannot feel the wind on her face, or the leaves and branches snagging in her mane, or hear her heart pounding in her ears?
Does she even exist, if she cannot feel herself?
She is thinking of her parents as she runs after Maeve and the ghost-boy, and of Leonidas and his wild eyes, of the unfinished poems waiting for her in her bedroom, of the sunflowers that tapped on her window in the summer. They all flash past her eyes now, all of them wound up into the shape of a grulla boy who had laughed too spitefully.
So she runs. She runs, because it is the only thing she has left.
a sunflower soul
with rock n roll eyes
curious thoughts
& a heart of surprise
i look over at you
and see sunshine
@maeve ! notes
"butter mellow"
