[private] you've been on my mind since the flood; riptide

[hyperia]

you've been on my mind since the flood

She does not know what it is like to be free, not really.

Her life begins and ends with the river. She wonders, sometimes, if she was made of it or it of her—and then she wonders if it matters. In the end, does any of it? Perhaps that is why she always tucks away such thoughts when they come to her, instead letting her body go loose and slipping back into the water. She does not have her mother’s gifts—does not remain as herself and simply breathe in the water as though it is air. Instead, she becomes the water. She dissolves until there are no boundaries. No edges to her.

She is that today.

Young and naive. Bubbling and serious. She lets herself be as many moods as her wondrous river and she chooses to view the endless freedom in the waters instead of the shackles of it.

She follows the tides, rushing along the currents, laughing in bubbles that rise a non-existent throat. When she is finally washed up on the banks, she takes her time gathering herself back together. Perhaps because she simply enjoys the frothing edges of her legs as they form but, more likely, because she is incapable of doing anything fast with these gifts. They come naturally, but that doesn’t mean they come easily.

When her moss-covered legs finally fold under herself, she lifts her red eyes upward, what should be a childish mane instead falling in small streams down her thin neck. She shakes and the water splashes and then reforms in that strange magic, liquid and movable and unending. There is laughter again, but it is soft as the evening and if there is a loneliness to it, she quickly tucks it away where even she cannot see it.

heaven help a fool who falls in love