03-20-2022, 04:45 PM
Ryatah
WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU
IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU
She wonders if it is something wrong with her, that all of her children are such broken things. She watches each of them as they struggle with their various curses and hardships, and the guilt gnaws at her in a way that she cannot shake. It must be her fault, she reasons; it must be something to do with her own wretched blood that she has bled into them, that her own misfortune turns itself into the thing they inherit most from her. They break a thousand different ways, and sometimes they come to her and sometimes they don’t, and either way she feels like a failure.
She fails to keep them safe and she fails to not be something they think they need to hide away from, but how can she blame them? She has never managed to piece her own life back together. It is no wonder they assume she cannot do it for them.
And they are all painfully beautiful even in their brokenness — all of them lovely and striking in their own ways, though none of it is because of her. Her heart was known for being a foolish thing, and when she learned that she could not keep those that she tried to love, she learned she could take something from them that would be hers forever.
Even if it is wrong to have children as the keepsakes of romances that were harder to hold onto than smoke, she does not regret it.
When she sees Sela in the golden afternoon light, when her starless-dark eyes find his, she does not see him for all the things that he counts as faults. She sees him only as another thing too perfect to have come from her, an angel carved from ice—another version of his father’s darkness combating against her light. “Sela,” she says his name, soft and almost a whisper, afraid that speaking any louder will send him back to the outskirts he always seemed to prefer. Another failure on her part, because he had been born during the eclipse with a twin not meant for the dark, and so much of her energy had been spent keeping Este alive that Sela inadvertently fell through the cracks.
“I’ve missed you,” she tells him once she has closed the gap between them, taking in the familiar yet unfamiliar angles of his face, because he has grown since the last time she saw him. There is a pain that alights in her eyes, an ember that never quite goes out as she stares at him, all the unspoken apologies sitting in a tangled knot in her chest where they never learn to take shape on her tongue.
She fails to keep them safe and she fails to not be something they think they need to hide away from, but how can she blame them? She has never managed to piece her own life back together. It is no wonder they assume she cannot do it for them.
And they are all painfully beautiful even in their brokenness — all of them lovely and striking in their own ways, though none of it is because of her. Her heart was known for being a foolish thing, and when she learned that she could not keep those that she tried to love, she learned she could take something from them that would be hers forever.
Even if it is wrong to have children as the keepsakes of romances that were harder to hold onto than smoke, she does not regret it.
When she sees Sela in the golden afternoon light, when her starless-dark eyes find his, she does not see him for all the things that he counts as faults. She sees him only as another thing too perfect to have come from her, an angel carved from ice—another version of his father’s darkness combating against her light. “Sela,” she says his name, soft and almost a whisper, afraid that speaking any louder will send him back to the outskirts he always seemed to prefer. Another failure on her part, because he had been born during the eclipse with a twin not meant for the dark, and so much of her energy had been spent keeping Este alive that Sela inadvertently fell through the cracks.
“I’ve missed you,” she tells him once she has closed the gap between them, taking in the familiar yet unfamiliar angles of his face, because he has grown since the last time she saw him. There is a pain that alights in her eyes, an ember that never quite goes out as she stares at him, all the unspoken apologies sitting in a tangled knot in her chest where they never learn to take shape on her tongue.
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE
@Selaphiel