I'll always love you the most.

[Spyndle]

The river became her home.
It was as much a part of her as flesh or bone or cowardice.

It became her whole past, and it became her only future.
It became the air in her lungs. It became the blood in her veins, and the poison, too.
And it became her prison. The hazel branches made for pretty bars, but pretty bars still feel like iron sometimes.

She was wild once.
She was nameless once.

‘Are you alone?’
‘Yes,’ she answers without words.

…

She follows the river until it ends.

It winds around a hazel tree that teeters aslant on its shoreline, dipping the ends of its weathered, leaved fingers and casting ripples in the glassy surface of the river water, and then it turns violent. After that it spills out all of its darkest, heaviest secrets across a craggy cliff face and out into the open jaws of an ocean below that seems to hunger for the violence. The noise is deafening; all broken molecules and weathering stone. She feels her breath catch in her throat, and there are parts of her that cry out for the loss of this tangible idea that became so much more. She had thought once that she’d follow this river for always.

‘That’s what ghosts do,’
‘They come back.’

But there are parts of herself that are bigger, and they are grateful for the finality, however cataclysmic.

Because it feels as though she’s haunted this river for eternity already, moving in all of the same sick and cyclical patterns. She’s so tired of coming back, again and again.  And it feels as though she has always wanted this, to stand on this precipice now, and breathe in one final calm before the fall. ‘I think this will consume us,’ she said once - and it had. They dissolved like ancient empires into seas. The flesh and fat of them was burned away; bones laid bare. It consumed them.  Goodbyes are never made to be easy, but some are not so difficult.

And that’s what this is - goodbye.

She can feel her body trembling beneath her own weight, and when it trembles, again and again, she can’t help but think of the way Her touch had felt like electricity - how it made her flesh roll like the ocean waves below her now (made her crash and churn and live and die - just like them). And she knows she shouldn’t smile in these moments, with everything behind her and nothing before her, but she feels the corners of her lips pull up at their ends for the memory. She will never love anything so much again.

There are enough fleeting moments that she could drown in them, and yet, there are not nearly enough for her to live on. She is suffocating as they unravel; as images of all the things that she has seen and loved turn hazy and tear towards their curling edges. She sees their faces shift and morph and warp and ruin, and in turn, she does the same.

She hoped they could survive this once.

“I can’t,” she says aloud, because there is a list of failures writ against the flesh on her brow and the blood weeps into her eyes and leaves her blind. Because it took too long for her to realize that her existence was selfish (that so long as she exists they cannot), but she does now.

“I can’t.”

‘Someday,’ Cordis had said then, ‘I’ll learn how to build worlds. And then we can leave everything else.’
But it will turn out that Spyndle learns first.

So she moves just one step forward, because every step she’s taken before this one was backward.
One step forward, and she’s never sunk so fast before; the weight of the world becomes her anchor.

Goodbye.

…

If she were made of moments and not atoms, then she would be a beautiful kaleidoscope of all the pretty things they never said, and of all the times that they were too afraid. She would be a patchwork quilt of ugly memories, of ‘I can’ts’ and pleading. And if she were made of moments and not atoms, then in her eyes the rivers and the sunsets would shine bigger than her empty irises, and her flesh would burn in all of the places they once loved each other.

Because she has loved the things you should not love.

And it feels like burning. It feels like burning like galaxies burn; all fractured light and tangled stars - and moments, not atoms, string together a constellation that always draws out the lines of Her face. She has loved the things you should not love, and she would love Her again - one thousand times over.

One day, She’ll learn to build worlds and they’ll leave everything else.
Until then, she’s never felt so at peace with her head pressed so hard against the stone.

‘I miss seeing you apart from everything else.’
Red is everywhere, but she only sees silver.

Goodbye.

…

And this macabre fog rolls in across the ocean and the rocks, filling every shape and silhouette with thick white - and when at last it rolls out, the flesh is clean from her bones.

And the tide creeps forwards until the water covers what remains of her skeleton before the waves buries her deeper than she’s ever been before.

And the river takes her heart, because she’s always kept it there.

And she is wild again.
And she is nameless again.

[Cordis]

Here are some things she shouldn’t know:

She shouldn’t know every exact angle and plane of her, as if she were an architect beholding her creation. Which is a foolish metaphor, because nothing she’s every made could hold a candle to Spyndle. She shouldn’t know what her skin looks like wet, in the river, or dry under a springtime sun, or ripped open, eviscerated.

She shouldn’t know what she feels like, from first hesitant caresses years in the making to fervent lovemaking. She shouldn’t know this because it was – as all things between them were – an impossibility. Impossible, that they should have been in the same place at the same time; impossible, that their paths should have crossed; impossible, that they should have found one another over and over and over again until one of those times the lines could be crossed, and they could touch.
Impossible, that they should still love each other after all this time. After everything.

She shouldn’t know what her back looks like as she leaves (again).

She shouldn’t know that if she dies, she can bring her back.

(Because that’s not always the case, is it? You are not god. You’re a fool with some lightning and a wish.)

She shouldn’t know the way that the word goodbye tears you from the inside out. That sometimes, it’s like a living thing crawling up your throat, clawing and thrashing until you spit out blood.

She shouldn’t have promised her worlds. Not without some kind of plan. But she isn’t an architect. We know this.
(She will make worlds. She will. It’s impossible. She will. Impossible has never mattered to them before.)

Shouldn’t. Impossible. I can’t. They are a world of negatives, of denial. Backs turned. Bodies cringing away. Leaving. Always fucking leaving, because they were too much, together; they couldn’t stand it.

Look. Love isn’t like this. The concept of soulmates is foolish. The idea that destiny, and fate, bring souls together and make some sort of firestorm is foolish, it negates the quieter love that blossoms.
Look. This love is nothing short of destruction. This love is a natural disaster – all negatives and backing away and lightning. Chemistry making chemical fires, impossible to put out, leaving everyone burned
Look. Whatever you want to call it, she’d build worlds for her.
She’d destroy worlds for her, too.

Let’s switch, now. From shouldn’t to can’t. Because it’s fitting, isn’t it? They’re built on that, on I can’t.

She can’t know that the bones are hers. She can’t know that because it’s impossible. Because bones are bones are bones.
But there is something – an echo of magic, perhaps, some sliver of it forgotten in her blood – knows. Knows because she’s spent years of her life memorizing the flesh that once graced those bones. Because it’s what she sees whenever she closes her eyes.
Because they’re bound. Because whatever this is – whatever bastardized, ridiculous, star-crossed force this is – they’re bound.
She knows. She shouldn’t know. She can’t know.
She knows.

And grief wells inside her, a force too tremendous to comprehend. She moves without thinking, without knowing, moves into the river, dazed. Perhaps she thinks to follow her, although Spyndle has gone to a world Cordis cannot pass through.
She wants to say something. A prayer, maybe. But her name – which she’d always said like a prayer – feels like dust in her bloodied mouth.
She walks, chest deep now, mud sucking at her hooves, when something bumps against her. She thinks it’s a fish for a moment, until she glances down, and sees it’s a heart, twisting in the river’s current. A sound is torn from her – a cry, primal, grief echoing over the water.
Because she knows that heart, too.

The current brings the heart back to her, and it collides with her chest – but rather than fall back, she feels it stay pressed against her.
And, as she has always done, she opens herself to her.
For a moment, she shimmers in the water, liquid, transformed. It’s long enough for the heart to be absorbed into her, to be carried inside her, nestled next to her own.
The metaphor of their love made corporeal.

And this is what stops her. This is what keeps her from walking out further. She feels warmer, fuller.
It’s not enough, of course. Grief is still on her, a savage monster with claws sunk deep into her silver skin. She is still a ship, wrecked on the shore with no lighthouse to guide her home. Disaster is still writ all over her.
But when she walks out of the river – walks out alone – there are two hearts beating inside her.

I’ll touch you all and make damn sure

Cordis

that no one touches me