like flowers
we can also choose to bloom
we can also choose to bloom
T
hat breath she takes — slow, steadying, the way she inhales and holds it there in her lungs, eyelashes fluttering down — he knows the feeling. And while Solstice is breathing in Ipomoea is breathing out, feeling his chest deflate, grounding himself into the earth, flowers reaching out as if to say we’re here, we’re here, it’s okay to fall into us —Another day and he might have.
It was always to the meadow that he came when the world started to turn too fast and his heart never seemed to beat fast enough to catch up. It was always to the poppies, and the wildflowers, and the gentle permanence of the grass growing taller every day, growing softer, growing stronger. And it never ceased to both amaze him and calm him — the immortality of the world. The way it exists quietly, and how it went on and on and on towards some deeper goal despite the modern-day things that make him stop in his tracks.
There was a quote, he knew, about watching grass grow. But Ipomoea knew that whoever coined the phrase knew absolutely nothing about the grass, had never learned to listen to the endless conversations it had with the sunlight and the soil. But he — he learned something new everyday. The waving of a tree’s boughs in a storm is both surprising and familiar, new and old, nodding to him, and he nodding back.
So he breathes out, and he feels the grass anchoring him — he breathes in, and he smells the flowers dancing red around their bodies.
And he smiles.
It’s a soft, almost sad smile — listening to her story, aching because he does not know the weight of her chains both physical and emotional, but wondering how they have not bent her neck all the same. He thinks he would not be so resilient, if their roles had been reversed (it was why, after all, he had ran from the desert before he had given it a chance to scar him.)
"I think you are more special than you think, even if it is not in the way they thought," he tells her quietly. "And maybe you’ll find your luck can change here."
For a moment there is only the wind and the meadows and them standing there in it all.
He tilts his head back to look at the sky before he speaks again. It seemed to him a sign — that her eyes were the same color as the sunlight. "I’ve spent long enough intruding," he says at last, dipping his head to her. "I’ll leave you alone to the meadow — maybe here you can learn to be like the flowers and the trees. I can promise that here, at least, you can know freedom." But not invisibility, he does not say, even when the words are leaping in his heart and whispered to her on the petals of every flower pressing against her legs. Never teach yourself to hide when you deserve to live in all your colors.
"I hope to see you again Solstice. If you’d like, you can find me in the city, on the other end of this meadow. Ask for Ipomoea."
And then with a smile and a bob of his head (and a whisper of magic to the flowers, telling them to keep her company), Ipomoea is turning away. And with the grasses shush, shush, shushing at his sides, he makes his way back to the Dawn Court.
@solstice "speaks" <3
