It is hard to live with yourself when you keep anger always just out of reach, when you choose, time and again, to set rage aside for another day. It simmers and builds and comes back twice as strong.
That day was just the start of things. But I knew, oh I knew even then, it was only a matter of time until the walls of self control would break.
But I told myself it could break a different day, and I poured myself into my sister.
Avesta hid her pain well but not completely, not from me; I may not have been there during the war with all its wounds and all its growths, but I remembered the first time she fell. We had been running through the woods and she tripped on a fallen branch. She did not wail or sob, her pain was discreet as she rose up thin and leggy and determined to not let pain (or, for that matter, any other damn thing!) get the best of her. “Of course I’ll stay,” I blink back at her brave, weary eyes. “I’m not going anywhere.” And I settled down next to her, shifting so her cheek could rest on my shoulder.
I have learned a lot from trees, and it bleeds through into every aspect of me. I think when others look at me, they see someone very still. Very steady. But the truth is that I’ve always been more comfortable in motion. At work with the cleaning and the healing of the wound, I felt myself shine through all the cracks others saw. When I hummed, my inner silence reached its ponderous roots deep into the earth. And when I chewed the roots of the rosinweed, my magic relaxed and spread out across the sand and waves, over the craggy roots of mangrove and shaggy lumps of beachgrass.
This time I did not just receive all the stories of the world but I gave them mine. I mixed it with love’s bleeding edge; a promise, a pledge. And I began to tell a story that was different from our mother’s. “Beneath the stones that make up the foundation of the court, there are three skeletons...”
I continued long after Avesta fell asleep, and then Furfur, and finally Foras. Meanwhile the sea watched us, and listened, and waited.
a s p a r a
That day was just the start of things. But I knew, oh I knew even then, it was only a matter of time until the walls of self control would break.
But I told myself it could break a different day, and I poured myself into my sister.
Avesta hid her pain well but not completely, not from me; I may not have been there during the war with all its wounds and all its growths, but I remembered the first time she fell. We had been running through the woods and she tripped on a fallen branch. She did not wail or sob, her pain was discreet as she rose up thin and leggy and determined to not let pain (or, for that matter, any other damn thing!) get the best of her. “Of course I’ll stay,” I blink back at her brave, weary eyes. “I’m not going anywhere.” And I settled down next to her, shifting so her cheek could rest on my shoulder.
I have learned a lot from trees, and it bleeds through into every aspect of me. I think when others look at me, they see someone very still. Very steady. But the truth is that I’ve always been more comfortable in motion. At work with the cleaning and the healing of the wound, I felt myself shine through all the cracks others saw. When I hummed, my inner silence reached its ponderous roots deep into the earth. And when I chewed the roots of the rosinweed, my magic relaxed and spread out across the sand and waves, over the craggy roots of mangrove and shaggy lumps of beachgrass.
This time I did not just receive all the stories of the world but I gave them mine. I mixed it with love’s bleeding edge; a promise, a pledge. And I began to tell a story that was different from our mother’s. “Beneath the stones that make up the foundation of the court, there are three skeletons...”
I continued long after Avesta fell asleep, and then Furfur, and finally Foras. Meanwhile the sea watched us, and listened, and waited.
@Avesta <3
