02-11-2016, 12:09 AM
Today is one of her more lucid days. She can remember mother, the cold sand color of skin that was neither gold nor silver but somewhere in-between, an impossible shade that should not exist and yet did anyway. She remembers the gruesome twist of her half face, the awkward way her words slurred together and the way smiles seemed to slip right off her mouth as soon as they appeared. She remembers father too, dark and ominous in a way she could not explain, his face changed also by the weight of his past and his present. But it was not like Elses face, where literal flesh and bone and muscle had caved in on itself. It was the tension around his mouth and along his jaw, the heaviness of eyes impossibly dark and sad. The weight of entire worlds sitting in the craters at his shoulders where once there had been wings that cracked and bled and peeled apart. She remembers them because He allows her to, because He knows how much it hurts her to remember. In some ways it helped that He had made them forget, Else and Caius and everyone she had met as a small child. Especially Else. Elanor did not want them to know the hands she had fallen into, whose bottomless eyes swallowed her soul each time He smiled wide like a crocodile and called her close. But even though she felt something like relief knowing they would not worry or wonder, she knew why he had done it. There was something that far surpassed the simplicity of loneliness, something cold and heavy that she had come to know by the weight it left in her chest beside the echo of her broken heart. No one was looking for her. No one loved her. No one even remembered her. Her heart shuddered wildly within her chest, the sorrow rippling outwards in waves she could barely endure. It was so easy to wonder if any of this was even real, if Elanor existed at all or if the true reason no one looked for her was because she was just a rogue figment of imagination, a poor beast caught in an endless vicious dream, a never-ending hell. He kept her frozen between the folds of time and space, her inert body tethered to Him when he carried on with His day charming strangers with the ability of a viper. She was there, always, but no one ever noticed because He never let them. Did she even exist at all. Her eyes flashed open and she startled because she had not remembered closing them. She did not dream anymore, the kindness of escaping to her sleep did not suit Him, and instead when she closed her eyes she had visions of falling, of depths darker than His eyes and an eternity of sinking until He caught her like an embrace of broken glass. But when she peered out at Him reluctantly, the trembling of her heart in perfect unison with the shivers racing along her skin, there was only the dark of a starless night to greet her. She flinched without meaning to as a brittle wariness stole the breath from her lungs. “Just let me fall.” She tried to whisper in a voice she knew would be brittle and broken and wildly hoarse if He let her speak at all. “Please just let me fall.” |