[P] and the marsh became her mother,

[Elena]

Elena Daray

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

T

here are things that she wants, too.

There are the things that she’s slaughtered and buried – the bones of secrets that she cannot bring herself to spill, the secrets she holds in the crook of her throat because she’s spilled too much already. There are a thousand things that she has wanted, but wanting, wanting eats her up. Wanting leaves her eviscerated, wanting leaves her split from neck to belly (and she has spilled too much already). Wanting leaves her empty. Wanting is never free.

Wanting splits her into halves, and sometimes even now she can still feel the half that she has left (the girl she was once when wanting things didn’t feel like an infection), and that girl is always crying – that girl has flowers in her hair and in her hands that she brings every day, as though the girl that she is now is lain out beneath a gravestone marker, six feet deep. Wanting can be lethal. Wanting can ruin.

Her own hands are not cleaner – there’s blood beneath her nails, too.

It’s what happens when you let yourself want.

She remembers a poem suddenly, coming to her side:
Tell me about the sun and the moon,
for he died every night for her to bloom
tell me about the sun and the moon
for she hid everyday until it struck noon

The moon does not look for the sun, it dies. And she hides away from the grief. So is the moon cowardly, striking a knife in his chest each night? Or is it the sun that slips beneath the horizon, only peeking out in the morning hours when she is sure the moon has stopped bleeding stars?

“I know,” She says, and she can see a thousand faces that must reflect in the darkest fractures of her eyes. “But I do,” she says, because everyone needs someone to care for them, to stand for them. The stag moves and Elena’s attention is taken before resuming those blue eyes looking upon the girl, ears moving forward atop her head as she speaks.

The stag leaps.
Avesta leaps.
Elena leaps.

She is forgetting something about the water. She does not care what it remembers, but she is forgetting that this water is not hers, it is not hers to throw memories into. And so Elena will make sure that the water only remembers the torrent of splashing, the running, and Elena crying out: “Stop. Let him be!”

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Avesta