Her skin still smells like earth, and there, tangled like poor excuses between the fragile wisps of her hair the smell of ozone becomes trapped and lingers. Above her a storm is seeking fruition in the cold, dark grey of the clouds, but she’s been living in a storm of her own making for so long now that she barely notices despite the electricity in the air that she breathes in, reluctantly.
She moved mountains again today.
She swore to herself she wouldn’t move them again, but the emptiness was eating away at her soul like emptiness shouldn’t be able to do — and so she did. Grief made you capable of anything, and so she tore holes through the earth with what remained of her mind and she did it all knee-deep in the honeysuckle and wildflowers that still coated Moselle’s grave.
She moved the dirt like she was made for it.
In a lot of ways, she was.
And when the earth was finally gone a shallow grave atop her mother’s was all that remained. Eilidh stood across her work and thought that if, years from now, someone came across their ancient bones it might look like they died here together. Like mother and daughter fell asleep in the crooks of each others bodies and never woke. The thought brought her a type of peace, and her knees buckled like ancient cities collapsing; like they had withstood a thousand years of agony, or more — like they had kept invasions at bay and spear after spear outside their city walls, but now were ready to break like dams.
To surrender felt like relief in a way, and she was ready to finally meet her end as she lifted the dirt overhead and it sprinkled across her cheeks like war paint.
Something stopped her though.
The glint of sunlight sinking low into the mountains found her eyes through the shield of her own would-be suicide; a light. And so she set the mountain of earth down next to her shallow grave instead of over it, and she lifted her body another time.
The last time, she reminds herself, as she moves towards the river feeling compelled to do so and without knowing why.
Eilidh?
Somehow the sound finds her through the haze of her stupor; a cheek turns slowly so that she might see him from across the crook of her right shoulder. If he’d asked her what she felt in these moments she’d lie. The truth is that she thought about him more than she would ever admit aloud. She thought about the heat of the summer night. She thought about the way it looked as though they were constellations themselves, scattered through the galaxies like stars that had burned for far longer than either of them could likely comprehend. She thought about the sheepish grin that made a home of his face, and how at ease it had put her. She thought, longingly, about going back to that night all the time.
“Leander,” she says, softly, turning her body to face him and somehow still finding enough left alive of her to smile.
Her shipwreck is obvious, though. Once she was soft, and sleek. Now she is all harsh angles and xylophone ribs, mats and burrs and tangles of hair between them. The dried blood is still on her neck from the time he touched her and left his mark. Beads of sweat prickle and roll from the gentle rounds of her hips and slope of her shoulders; markers of her efforts, but he’ll think it’s only river spray (or at least that’s what she tells herself to soothe the busy heart slamming up against the walls of her chest).
“I couldn’t find a light,” she says, in way of explanation, feeling every bone that juts from every piece of sunken flesh in these moments.
He didn’t ask her to explain herself, but she’d learned enough about compassion and kindness to assume that he might. She doesn’t wait to see if the smile on his face will die. So she waits, basking in shame and disease alike, drawing her eyes away from his to see the horizon, the river, the ground, the trees — anything but the pity she is certain clouds his expression next.
“Did you?”
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Lydia] hi i also did a thing