(There is no time to discern the weight of the promises it
took to reach this salvation, the necessary evils that she buries in her bones. There is no
time for anything but her, but to stand, nose-to-nose, sharing air and gravity and worlds.)
“I’ve never been sure how to answer that,” the stranger says.
Glassheart finds herself nodding gently in agreement.
“Are you?”
“Am I sure sure how to answer that, or am I alone?” A deflection, and a poor one, but she isn’t ready to reveal herself just yet. It’s been months now, and she had echoed that phrase (“Are you alone?”) again, and again, to more than a handful of passersby like the cordial, obedient puppet she’d become. They’d always direct it back to her, and even after all the rehearsal each time she’d been left speechless.
She doesn’t know why, but she can’t help noticing the way the wildflowers hug the slopes of her hips, or how easy it might be to draw maps with her lips across her skin. The thought confuses her, but it’s nothing compared to the cacophony and rattle of voices and memories that the intruder wants her to feel now; a kaleidoscope of beauty and horror, magnified, surely, by the proximity of her skin to this strangers.
Everything is suddenly loud, and on fire.
(“You are beautiful, you know,” she says against a silver cheek, because even when the
future sits neatly before them she is always looking into the sunsets and riverbanks of their past.)
“Who are you?” Glassheart asks, because it feels as though she knows everything else already - like the way she could look soft in the river, if she wanted to, when the water and light reflected off her skin. Like the way it could feel like everything when she looked at you and saw her whole world (earth, ocean, and air). Like the way the heat of her body could feel against your skin. Things she couldn’t possibly know.
And then it happens - her curiosity eats through her resolve, and her cards are on the table when she asks: “Who is she?”
She’s a fool for standing here.
A fool for pushing, for wanting answers or importance, or both.
Because to know Cordis is to lose yourself; it’s to burn, slowly. She doesn’t know that yet. The memories did not show her (would not, in fact), because their source had made her choice eons ago - to burn, again, and again, and again.
There’s a moment where she tries to stop herself, a moment where she draws her curiosity inward and thinks better of it, but when she exhales she finds herself reaching out to touch the stranger anyways - like her skin might be braille, like she might read the stories and decipher their meanings all through only the skin of her lips. She should heed the lightning on her skin, but she doesn’t.
She should leave, but she doesn’t.
(“Touch me,” she says then, pleads, when the gravity between their noses feels too
heavy.)
Glassheart
i'll always love you the most