isolt.
She does not stop to wonder if Danaë can feel the way her cheek trembles beneath her touch. Beneath her skin she can feel her second-heart (her soul-heart) unfurling like dahlias that Isolt presses into, presses hard enough to feel each petal and serrated leaf digging into her skin.If there was a way to fill herself with them instead of their death, she would. If there was a way to replace her hunger with her sister’s sorrow, she would gladly use her own blade to make the first cut by which to bleed it all out.
Sometimes Isolt thinks the only mistake that was made when they were born is that they should be divided so cleanly into hunger and sorrow, rage and aversion. She thinks it is wrong that they should be such extremes, as much as she thinks it right that the only thing in this world that should exist to balance her would be her twin.
But when she presses into her sister and watches Aspara and her wolf trail away, she is trying to fill herself with her sister. With her softness, with her sorrow, with her petals that weep like tears from the dahlias. She is trying to find an end to all of this hunger and pain that begs her to chase after the other-unicorn, to run and run and not stop until she has made a corpse for her sister to turn into a garden.
She trembles from the pain of watching her leave. And she presses her trembling shoulder into her sister’s because she knows she is the only one who will understand.
When the first mirror crumbles to dust, her eyes slip closed with a sigh. And when the second crashes beside the first she feels the trembling begin to slow, and the aching begin to ease. As the third falls she is holding her sister’s weight like it is the only thing in the world she was made to carry, as star-skeleton after star-skeleton collapses around them.
And the only thing she is wondering then, is how much of these dead-stars they can return to the earth.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
