It's like forgetting the words to your favourite song // Basilica

[Harlotte]

There were stars, and they called her name. 

That was what she liked to think, anyway. If anyone could make the harsh syllables of the word sound lovlier, kinder, it would be stars. Sadly, the way she wanted to hear her name was only in her head. Maybe, very rarely, murmured aloud in the dead of night, when she was certain she was alone. 

The stars weren't completely useless, however. For the violently hued girl, they were a cloak, a shield. Clouds of star dust spiraled from her shoulders in broad swathes. And when the sky was pitched just right, they brought her into the sky with them. 

This wasn't one of those nights. It wasn't night at all, actually. The sun, that had been missing for such a long time, had finally chosen to shine his face on them again. And so she was illuminated with the light, and unmistakable in the landscape as a result. She missed the dark that way. In the dark, she was mere starlight. That was easy to be. 

@[basilica] I have no idea, but here

[basilica]

Basilica

She moves slowly, carefully.
As if she does not trust the shadows not to hold dark things still.

(Sometimes the chest still aches with the memory of that day by the river, the day spent bleeding, leaned against a dream boy, counting stars.)

She has avoided the meadow. So diligently, she has skirted past its edges. It was here that the world had gone dark as she’d walked away from the only friend she’d ever had, his expression stern when he’d told her they’d never been friends. 

(Is the heart the reason that the memories are so vivid? They remain far longer than she’d like them to sometimes, lingering just at the fringes, always ready to come creeping back in. Because the heart has such a tremendous capacity for pain and what better catalyst than memories?)

But it is silly, she thinks, to blame a whole place for one bad thing that happened there. So, she tests it. (Foolish, she thinks, the way her heart thunders in her chest as she walks deeper into that knee-high grass.) She will make it a place where good things happen, a happy place.

She approaches the first soul she happens across, not only because she reminds her of the dream boy who’d found her by the river but because she does not trust herself to venture any further into the meadow. 

“You remind me of someone I knew once,” she muses, smiling. 

HEAVEN’S GATES HAD SUCH ELOQUENT GRAFFITI

@[Harlotte]