09-17-2017, 02:13 PM
It’s cold. Enough to see the clouds of her breath (clouds that should not exist), and raise the prickled bumps of her flesh. She shouldn’t feel it.
Ghosts feel nothing, after all.
It’s still. And there are hazel leaves on the trees beside the shore, silent and still with the morning frost, and they don’t shiver in the breeze. She shouldn’t notice, but she does. She hasn’t known feeling like this in eons. It’s almost like life.
But it isn’t.
It cannot be.
She is not real. She is only a feeling, or rather, a mixture of them - discordant, rattled together until the edges of each one are not distinguishable from the rest. A symphony of all the pieces she was once, lain out across the river; an orchestra turned spector. She’s almost tangible - flesh and bone save for the wisps and curls of her hair that smoke out into fog.
And all is as it was the last time. The willow is still slanted, and the river still spills out into a violent ocean. She stands across her bones not knowing they are her own, because that’s what ghosts do - they come back.
She doesn’t remember the last time, or the significance of her apparition. She doesn’t remember that the river was cold that day, and how it stung her flesh and felt like teeth (and how it feels like that now). She doesn’t remember that she had followed the river until it ended, or all of the sick metaphors that she had pulled from that ending. She doesn’t remember how she drove herself over the edge; out of the river and into the ocean, out of one world and into the next, or how the tide took all of her but the bones she stands over now.
She had sought finality. She had sought a peace she’d never known while she lived.
And what she had found was almost like finality.
What she had found was nearly peace.
There are no complications in the mist. There are no cryptic metaphors. There are no goodbyes. It doesn’t hurt to exist. Cities don’t crumble. Galaxies don’t collapse. She has never been halved, left for dead with the pieces of her being scattered through riverbeds. She cannot remember the last time the silhouette of Her goodbye was burned against the back of her eyelids.
It isn’t enough though.
Because what she still remembers is that she loved her recklessly.
Because what she still remembers is that Cordis was her sun, moon, stars, and gravity.
Because what she still remembers is that she would have been anything for her.
Because finality does not exist without them side by side, and the only peace she’s ever known she had found along the planes of Her flesh.
Death could not erase that.
“Are you alone?” She echoes into the mist.
“Yes,” She answers.