It’s strange to think that something that can happen in only a matter of moments can change your life forever. That’s all it took - moments, moments to watch the light in Moselle’s eyes fall away, moments to use everything left alive inside of herself to move the earth enough to sink what was left of her mother’s body into a shallow grave. Just moments for her to have been alive, and then erased.
Now the memories are all that Eilidh has, and so she pulls them through her mind, again and again and again, wringing them dry for the fear of losing them, too. Because she remembers, days afterwards, when the mound of earth that marked her grave was still dark and freshly uprooted, feeling so alone when she tried to draw on the feeling of touching Moselle’s skin and couldn’t. And now, how it sometimes could feel like she was never real to begin with. Like she was never here at all.
She knows what it feels like to have your light extinguished.
It had happened to her, after all.
The shadows are closing in as Eilidh wades through the meadow grass like an ocean, with thistles and lambs quarter that break across her legs and back like waves. She is making her way toward the river again, partly because she haunts it cyclically, and partly because there are quiet parts of her that hope for a second encounter with someone she’d met there recently. He’d left something in Eilidh that she had thought she’d forgotten; a light, small and fragile, but there.
“A light in the darkness,” she says, softly, as she walks.
When she rounds the wide trunk of an oak tree she sees her there, with the gathering dark on the horizon lingering in the fractures of her irises; a kindred spirit in the water. The river might have hidden her well enough from most, but not from Eilidh; she has existed in every inch of space that it offers.
“Do you like the night?” Eilidh asks, because she always has.
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Willa]