and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love
in this city that we love
The world she’d told him about was no longer such a distant memory as it had been in those times. Now, it threatened at her, an unwanted inheritance that she does not understand. She can almost smell the fecundity of it, the dense forest with is impossible growths, and it makes her stomach turn.
It is not her world, not her dream. She wanted to be done with it.
But the dream, it seems, is not done with her.
That doesn’t matter. She’s awake, now. Awake and still taking him in, and something in her chest feels sharp, cuts at her breathing, and she doesn’t have a name for it, doesn’t want a name for it, she just keeps breathing through the pain.
She forces a smile, or maybe it’s more honest than that. She doesn’t know yet if she’s pleased to see him, or scared, because he represents strange things, and he knows that she once lived in a dream land, and his wings have a hundred different shapes.
(It’s both, maybe. Happiness and fear colliding like comets inside her.)
“Me either,” she responds, and she tries to keep her voice light, though the weariness sinks in, “but here we are.”
She looks at him closer, sees another kind of weariness on him. She doesn’t know what the years have done to him, but she can tell it’s something – he’s changed. Of course he’s changed. So has she.
(She dreams, now.)
“How have you been?” she says, a Pandora’s box of a question, but she asks it nonetheless.
Irisa
tarnished x heartworm