Thana discovers, as her soul flutters awake at the sound of his voice, that she doesn’t know who Thana is. Her bones do not sit as they should in her skin without magic making her marrow feel like marble. The sound of her heart is different without the hunger and need. In her chest she does not hear a roar but a whimper, a bleat of a thing comforted in the black boughs of a midnight forest. There is no lighting dancing in jagged cracks across her eyes.
All that is left, as her soul transforms from wasp to butterfly, is that everlasting, ever-lingering, lament of sorrow. Sorrow, and seeking, and all the small fractures only Ipomoea might be able to keep together.
But even though she does not know who Thana is, she finds that she is desperate to discover it in the fiery garden of his touch. If there is a surrender here (her first) she is eager to give it when flowers start to bloom around the gore of her body. When she lifts her head to the echo of her spine cracking like a whip it is in a headlong rush towards the promise his magic, his love, his shadow of wrath, had whispered to her soul.
One butterfly becomes a swarm of them and each wing hums against the last until she is full not with the beauty of them but with the plague of them.
“Ipomoea.” She whispers so softly that the only sounds in her mouth are those of the butterfly swarm. And for a moment her heart and soul stumble over the look of him haloed by the brightness of their room that she did not fade. Had she been another unicorn, born perhaps instead of made, she would have swallowed down the butterflies so there was only the bittersweet of apology on her tongue.
But even a lost Thana, a wondering Thana, still holds only death in all the syllables of her name. And so gives him no apology, no sound of sorrow instead of butterfly swarms, no vocalized bleat of a thing comforted in the dark and bare boughs of a midnight forest. All she gives him is a kiss of skin to skin instead of teeth to skin, and hunger to bloom, and need to love.
Perhaps she only had to empty herself like a puddle in the desert so she could learn the sweetness of love instead of the ferocity of it. Perhaps she only had to turn inside out and witness death instead of becoming it.
Perhaps, she thinks (and she knows it is a lie when she blinks), I will only bear witness from this moment forward.
Her kiss does not leave his skin, she thinks it never will, when she leans her weary weight against him. “The island should not be here.” And when she finally gives him all the weight of her, all the hunger that is already rising again like a tide in her skin, she wonders if he is the only thing, the only thing, she had been spit out into this world to find.
@Ipomoea
