"hold me down, down, down until I remember how to fly.”
There are too many pieces of me to count left on the shoreline of my homeland. Each of those pieces is woven together with threads of bloody gold, moonlight, and glass shards sharp enough to kill as they splinter. Now I am only the pieces left behind-- the scars, the nightmares, the blood blots that feather out across the back of my eyes like clouds across the bright blue sky. I am regret, and hope, and immortality tangled into the misshapen form of a unicorn.
And I will never relearn all the other shapes that I could have been. I will never get them back.
Now I am a killer, a savior, a new-god with her teeth resting against the jugulars of the old ones who came to us with their tidal waves, endless winters, floods and fires. I am a unicorn who looks at a king with the fireflies hanging in his hair like pearls hang in mine and with hope in his bone where mine is filled with oil and salt. I can feel the sting of jealousy in my heart. The ache of it makes me wonder if I can pull from him all the ways in which to make myself feel like a savior instead of a destroyer again (even though I know that I would become the beast a million times over to save him from becoming one).
Sometimes, in moments like this when I am with someone else who says a million other things and cries a hundred tears in a word as I do, if in the end that everything I have done (everything I have suffered through) was in vain.
“I am glad to be home.” I pray that saying the words will make them true. I pray that I learn to love peace, that I learn how to become something other than dangerous and terrible. I pray, I pray, I pray and I think I am the only one left to listen to the words.
I wonder if the world will ever change. No matter how many times I blink back the thought, and cover my horn in fireflies and moonlight, it comes back again like a sickness.
And like the sick thing I am, the broken thing, I lean my firefly brightness to his. With my cheek to his, my rib to his, my hip to his, I try to relearn the why and ways of being a queen instead of a warrior. A story tickles at my lips like a hummingbird with the hunger of wasp. I think of a girl with hair the color of an oil-slick. I think of the fire in her belly and the way her anger was made of swords and teeth. I think of how she felt, how her mother felt, how the ignorance in her city felt.
I think of how she burned part of the world to the ground to save the other half of it.
“Not all of them. I could not free them all.” I whisper against the dip above his lips. And I think that my hair is oil-slick black and my heart is full of fire, and bitterness, and just enough love to let me push the fire out instead of in.
And I think that I am a terrible monster because it takes me until now, as I draw a line up his chest and remind myself that I am here, here, here and I should be lovely instead of hard, to ask him anything. “How is your home Ipomoea?” I blink so that he will not have to see the salt in the corner of my eyes where tears used to gather, or the brine exhaling from like nose like air should.
I hope that he does not see the monster that I see when he looks at me with the fireflies clinging to me in all the same ways they would cling to a stone.
@Ipomoea
