“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
This reminds me of what sorrow should feel like. It used to feel like this: touches in my hair and sea-salt crystallizing like snow in the corners of my eyes. Sometimes it even felt like winter piling up on my spine until I'm as heavy as the mountains and dipped in bone-white. And it still feels like weight, but it doesn't feel like drowning to me. Not anymore.
It feels like walking into the sea and drinking until a desert stretches out bloody all around us.
I want to tell her that she's still softer than me, better than me to turn away from war when the sorrow comes to call. I'm always turning towards all that blackness reaching out for me from a place across the sea with a smile on my lips and a spark in my ocean eyes. The sea brushes against our hocks, calling me home and onward and deeper, deeper, deeper. Antiope is looking out towards the roiling sea and the roaring storm and I wonder if it's going to call her home or push her home like a tide. I want to ask her if she can hear it, the way my magic and my fury and my want is howling back at the thunder. But instead I push my nose into her mane and hum instead of scream.
“There is a place on the other side of this sea where the gods of death wander among the mortals.” The words tumble out of the place where my lips meet her skin. I want to swallow them like it's an accident, like I'm not telling her all the ways in which I plan to take that awful world from them. I want to pretend that I'm not telling her that if I can I'll pass along the message as I walk through the darkness and devour it. There's more to say but I leave it alone even though it cuts on the way down when I swallow it.
There are a million things I should have said to her instead. Maybe I'm sorry or I understand would have been better.
Lightning streaks across the sky, highlighting the lines of Fable as he rockets from the waves. He looks almost terrifying like this, like he's not full of longing and a hundred dreams of all the stories I've raised him on. In the storm he looks like he could consume an entire world (just like the one across the sea). Let's go home, he says, the sea is too cold tonight. I say nothing back through those wonderful, awful lines between us. Instead I brush an invisible line down his wings when they blot out the moonlight. He understands.
My skin feels just as cold as the sea when I pull away from Antiope. It aches when the wind streaks through my mane like needles seeking blood. “Let's go home.” The lighting is starting to reach for the cliffs and each time there's thunder I can feel it humming in my blood like I am up there in the clouds instead of half in the sea and half in a war. If I stay here I'll have to answer the call of it and neither of us is ready for that. Not yet, not yet.
“I'd love a fire.” I don't say that I am a fire; I know I don't need too. She'll know. “There's a story I'd like to tell you once there are walls holding back the world.” Maybe she'll know that the need the walls to remind me that there are other in this world besides two women with suffering and hate in their hearts. Maybe she'll know there are parts of me that need a cage.
I turn towards home and do not look back towards the sea because I know what I'll see there twinkling on the horizon like a dare. My eyes still blaze though as I look at my, our, city shining like a sun in the night-dark.
Onward, I tell myself, onward.
@Antiope
