I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
Once, her heart had thrummed in her chest with the need for adventure. It had fluttered and frantically beat in her veins until she could hardly breathe around the want of it. She had hungered for the wild yonder and the great beyond in ways that she never should—foolish girl. She had wanted the things that she never could, the things she could never see, the places that she could never go.
She had wanted for a life that her body had simply not been made for.
And then—oh, then—she had been given a taste of it. She had known heartbreak and fear and even, for a glorious moment, the joy of a body so normal. But it had all been stripped from her, and she cannot do anything but feel the blame of it heavy on her shoulders and sitting like a stone in her belly.
She had loved someone she shouldn’t.
She had torn a love from him and wore his blood on her hands as a result.
She had made a deal to save him that she still cannot face.
(It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.)
Today, like so many days before, she rises and keeps to herself. Afraid to see the fear or the disgust in someone else’s eyes. Afraid to see the one she wants to see above all else. In another world, another life, perhaps she would have seen the beauty in herself—alien and unusual but beautiful nonetheless—but she can only see the papery skin and the glass bones and the delicate spiderweb of veins as hideous.
And she knows her heart is not different.
So she almost does not recognize when the handsome stallion moves across the meadow, some stranger’s name on his tongue, that he means her. A frown creases her brows and pulls at her delicate lips and she can only angle her head slightly in thought. “Charity,” she says the name quietly, wondering if it is a name or a plea, and then her soft pink gaze moves upward, catching his and studying the depths of his eyes.
“Have we met before?”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
