(Everything is different, but it will always be the same.)
Eilidh thinks about that day in the meadow often. She thinks about him, about those ten words in particular and how true they had become for her — because in spite of all of her best efforts she is still here, breathing in contagion when she knows better. Choosing death, again and again and again, rather than to leave this place behind.
Today, around the bend, and between two ancient oak trees Eilidh is laying at the foot of the bulge of earth that hides her mother’s bones. In the summer, the wheat grass had grown wild. It had taken years, undoubtedly, but it had claimed the land inch by inch until the grave was lost beneath it, and here and there was dotted with lilac cranesbill and yellow toadflax. Now, the wildflowers have died. They are nothing more than withered stalks, a ropey, earthy reminder of what once had been and now was no more.
If only the rest of Beqanna could do the same.
Because it isn’t fair that winter comes, and it looks no different than the winter before it. The ground is hard, and frosted. A thin layer of snow coats the long grass, but every-so-often a stalk breaks free into the open air. The sky is still cold, and bright gray, and it isn’t fair because everything left alive should be screaming — everything should be tinted a raw, and angry red. Because there should be warning when a world is this broken, when it is this diseased. Not peaceful like this. Not with the frail warmth of clouded sunlight on her skin, and the winter birds chirping deeper in the thicket.
The snow makes everything seem pure.
“I can’t leave you,” she says into the snow, with the side of her face resting gently against the frosted earth where the mound begins to slope up to house Moselle, or rather, what’s left of her.
She doesn’t mean for anyone to hear her.
There’s no one left alive to hear anyways.
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Decimate]