She is most comfortable in the shadows.
They have been the shadows of the mountain rocks. They have been the shadows of wild forests, and hazel trees. They have been the shadows of powerful and terrible men, but they have always been shadows. Shadows are cold, and dark, but sometimes light is blinding. Cordis was blinding. Cordis was the sun, and loving her had felt like burning. Loving her had felt like her flesh and bones were twisting in opposite directions, wrung out, until everything left worth having was spilled out onto the beds of rivers they once cherished.
Loving her was too much.
Leaving her is worse.
Leaving her feels like leaving earth. Leaving her feels like leaving gravity. It feels like white, even as fragile stalks of green grass hug the curves of her hips and a hot, yellow sun beats hard along the ridge of her spine and leaves the flesh there warm to touch. Leaving her feels like the fog she wandered before the lighthouse led her home. Leaving her feels like dying. Leaving her feels like nothing.
But there are things that she knows about nothing.
Nothing, sometimes, is safer.
Numbness, sometimes, prevents hurt.
So, she follows the shadows along a narrow path that she has never known before today, thinking of nothing and ignoring the thousands of colours around her save for the white. Once, she was a ghost, and she had haunted all of the same paths, walked in all of the same footprints, ended in all of the same ways. White, sometimes, is safer. Nothing, sometimes, is kinder.
But eventually, like all good things, the nothingness ends.
She comes face to face with a stranger, close enough to feel her breath hot against her cheek.
“Are you alone?” She asks, even if it hurts.
Are you alone?
Even if her heart aches a thousand times for each of those four syllables. Even if her stomach twists, and she feels split open. Even if her throat feels as though she has swallowed gasoline and struck a match.
Because even the agony of remembering is better than nothing at all.
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know