I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
There, over the din of the forest (birds and critters and muted conversation), she hears a voice.
It is not a question whispered tender in her ear.
It is not something soft that she can wrap around her weary shoulders.
It comes from someplace far away. It is something that has thought better of getting too close. And Lilian, she has never been inviting. She has only ever been ordinary, unremarkable, pitiful in a way that meant strangers turned away from her far more often than they sidled closer. Because there was so little to her that was not somehow tainted by the sadness at the very center of her. Because she had lost something once that she would never get back. Because sometimes she forgot to breathe. Or, perhaps, she merely wished that she did not have to.
Living had become so dreadfully painful without anything to live for.
But the question is not unfriendly. Lilian lifts her weary head, tries for a smile that lists and fades. A clumsy, half-hearted thing as she shakes her head. “No,” she calls back. And still, despite the storm cloud that has taken up residence in the cavern of her chest, there is some warmth to her voice. It is not honeyed, not even sweet, but at least she has not lost this.
And because she is starved for conversation, companionship, anything to distract from all the static in her head and the occasional hitch in her pulse, she wanders closer. There is something in the mare’s body language that indicates that she’d been on her way to someplace else and Lilian thinks that she should let her go, thank her for her concern (or whatever it had been that had inspired her to ask in the first place), and resume her ruminating. But she is alone, Lilian, and so dreadfully lonely. So, she moves to swallow up some of the space between them.
She feels a faint flicker of embarrassment as she settles in closer. Such a needy, desperate thing she is, she thinks, but she has never been able to help it. She has always looked for a sense of worth in others. “Well,” she says, the brow furrowing in a faint, contemplative frown, “not someone,” she continues, “but something, maybe.” She rolls a shoulder in a kind of shrug and then shifts away her focus with a sheepish smile.
“I’m Lilian,” she says, unprompted, dragging her gaze back to the mare’s face with that same bashful grin.
lilian
@[lilliana] i'm so sorry for the delay my lilian muse took a nosedive but! yay!