isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone
She can recognize the awe and wonder on the younger girl’s face, and she tries to understand what that must be like. When she had been newly born into this world she had been mostly confused. Trying to understand this strange body, this peculiar heartbeat, and the sister she had been born alongside and the mother that raised them. She had not even fully comprehended what she was at that age, and the confusion had left no room for childlike wonder. The relentless feeling of being lost, of not belonging, of being trapped had been consuming. Her childhood had been spent wondering why she was not like the rest of them, wondering why she felt virtually nothing when her mother held her, and why she didn’t care when she eventually stopped.
Discovering who and what she was had only offered minimal relief; realizing that she was, in fact, not meant to be here had at first cemented her to desire to leave, to get back to the sky. She isn’t sure if there is more of her missing, but a part of her thinks that regardless, some things are simply not meant to be made mortal. That whatever part of her is still gone might be unattainable from here.
“My mother has peculiar naming conventions,” she reasons to the young girl with a small quirk of a smile. It would be impossible to delve into all the idiosyncrasies that made up her mother, and not even Islas herself understood the relationship between her and her father. “I’m sure she had her reasons for choosing it.”
She nods her head at what she says, her slender neck arcing to touch her nose to her breastbone when she says, “It’s in here. I can feel it sometimes, I think, inside of my chest.” The star is different from her heart, has a different pulse and feel to it. She can feel when it gets restless, can feel when it is soothed. And she can feel when it calls to someone familiar, like the little star girl in front of her. “Maybe I will remember everything one day. And maybe then it will make being here easier.” Because maybe the pieces that are missing are what have created such a great divide in her – maybe it will be the key that unlocks all the parts of her that feel stuck, that feel so separated from everyone around her.
“It was….strange,” she begins slowly, but honestly. She tries to remember what it had been like to go back — it hadn’t seemed that long ago, but time passed so strangely here. “I didn’t go back as a star. It still felt like watching them from down here, but just, closer.” Something peculiar stirs behind her breastbone; an uncomfortable sensation that she can’t name — an almost sadness, if it had to be given a name. “I didn’t feel like I belonged there anymore, just like I don’t belong here, either.”
@[Shipka]