04-09-2016, 08:16 PM
marvel
of being intimate with brokenness
There is only one name she knows besides her own, only one name worth remembering. It belonged to a beautifully alien face, with skin stretched paper thin and translucent over glass bones like trapped tears, with pocks and fissures so that no one would misunderstand her frailty. It belonged to wings made ragged and brittle by wind, bruised by rain. Her name had been Adaline, and she had been everything kind and lovely about a cold, cruel world. Do you think it is impossible for the broken to be loved, Adaline had asked and Marvel was silent with the truth. She knew it was impossible for the broken to be loved, knew it by the way loneliness followed her like an unwelcome shadow. But she had not wanted to chase away this new, welcome warmth with the brandished blade of her honesty. In the end it had been the silence that pushed the girl away, anyway.
Marvel lifts her eyes to his face, except they are not her eyes and she does not realize that the grey had traded them for something meant to wound. So she fixes them on him and drifts woefully closer, her delicate blue face a mask of agony and brittle uncertainty. “No?” She repeats, she asks, stopping abruptly before reaching his translucent form. It is amazing how much that single syllable hurts, how deftly it buries itself like a blade in her chest and she gasps for the way pain blossoms around it like a bloodstain. “Am I really nothing to you?”
She can feel herself crumbling, can feel those orange eyes widen and wet, and then disappearing beneath the tangles of a dark mane when she finds she can no longer look at him. She knew a lifetime alone with no one to love her, and still she had harbored a dangerous feather of hope that when she found them, when they saw her, they would love her anyway. Suddenly, she would be enough and this world wouldn’t have to be so lonely. But he looks at her and he falls away as though his is the chest impaled, as though her words have wounded him and she is no more than a nightmare come to claim him. Her voice is brittle with the question that falls from her lips, brittle when even now she cannot look at him. “Why do I exist if no one wanted me.”
on the surfaces of who I am