The world has allowed her to keep to herself this last year. Herself and her brother. She has withdrawn, gladly, to contemplate the moon apart from herself. To watch as it cuts its trajectory across the sky and feel a longing so deep, so vast that there are some nights that she wonders if she would drown in it. She sleeps during the day—finding places where the sun cannot reach her—and she comes out when the sun has dipped below the horizon, when the world has cooled and only milky light is there to greet her.
She emerges from her cocoon of darkness and feels the ache build in her throat.
Tips her head back and watches herself alight in the night sky.
Feels that divorce like a physical amputation and wonders how her brother can stand it. How he can know that he is separated from that which he is and not feel himself tear apart at the seams in agony.
She cannot bring herself to ask him. Perhaps cannot stand the idea of him bearing such pain. Perhaps cannot stand the idea that she is alone in it. Either way, she withdraws, even from him—if ever so slight. She withdraws and walks alone in the evening, her heart a heavy thing in her chest.
As she walks, her body as silver as the moon above, she slips into her other form. The deer is mature now, as is she, but still slight, and her delicate steps barely disturb the grass as she makes her way through the meadow, across a slender portion of the river before stepping into the forest that calls for her.
