‘Take it then.’
Once upon a time ago she’d said those words, and she can still hear the sizzle of the syllables as the words found salvation between her parted lips and hit the earth like acid. It was an easy choice then, and she can’t remember seconds existing between His proposal and her answer. What He wanted then had felt impossible. What He wanted then had felt like something the laws of physics could not allow. She should have known better. She had every reason to know better – to know that she existed in a world where loving something badly enough could kill her, and lightning could bring her back.
But He made it an easy choice then, to sneer and to spit, to tell Him to take what she did not have; what did not exist, what should never have existed.
It was an easy choice then, until magic made them a boy and a girl, and that same magic made the girl look just like Cordis. And then, when He came for her, it felt like losing both of them.
And in her mind she thought up schemes to save her.
She kept them safe, like heirlooms; seen and never touched – because in her head she was so much cleverer than reality had ever proven her to be. In her head they forged new identities. They wore disguises, wrought with magic, extravagant enough to change the way their bodies glittered with metal, and in her head even He, with all of his omnipotence, could not see through the charade. In her head they survived. In her head they were both safe before the wicked could creep in.
Reality is different, and uglier.
‘Yes, of course I’m real.’ Perse says, like she was a fool to spend a thousand nights wondering if her heart still beat. Of course. Of course.
They are only moments, but they feel like shards of glaciers falling into a sea. They feel like waves, monumental, obliterating, like the blue of water explodes in every direction revealing Atlantis after so many hungry years without. They feel so much bigger than they are, but they are only minutes, only seconds, only moments until she answers.
“I’ve missed you,” because even though there are a thousand other things that she could say, that she should say, these are the words that play again and again on repeat.
And even if her words are brave, she still won’t meet her daughters eyes. If they are the windows to her soul, then she will not look in – then she cannot press her cheek against the glass and fog it’s edges with her exhales while watching all the things that her daughter knows that she should have kept her from, all the things that were her fault, all the things she made reality when she said:
‘Take it then.’
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know