She is made up almost entirely of flaws and mistakes, broken and fragmented but stitched together by toxic coping mechanisms and an uncanny ability to hide behind a mask. She is a hyaline surface of a sea, pristine and smooth but begging for something to crash right through it; begging for something to jump-start the chaos that brews beneath.
She breathes in, and though the feeling is grounding – the feel of air as it fills her lungs, the feel of it passing again between her lips when she sighs it out – it does nothing to settle the unrest in her chest. Her heart beats, ticking like a grenade with the pin pulled but she isn’t sure when the explosion is going to come, or if it ever will.
There was something about the early light of morning that unsettled her. Maybe it was the unnatural quiet, the false sense of serenity and the way it clashed with the turmoil that surged in her veins. Maybe it made her thoughts too loud when there was nothing else to drown it out, and she was forced to face her mistakes. She is forced to see Skellig’s face, she is forced to remember how he would clench his jaw when she came home covered in their scents but he never said anything. She isn’t sure when he finally left; she just knows the emptiness gave her an excuse to try and fill up the vacant space.
She watches the copper colored mare as she watches the doe and her twins, and she isn’t sure why she pauses to actually look at her. She isn’t someone that she knows, which is usually the only thing that draws her from the distracted fog she was typically lost in. But there was a twinge of loneliness somewhere between her ribs, and for a moment she almost remembers what she had been like before. She had been sweet, once. She had been enchanted by strangers and their stories, she had been genuine and caring.
That had changed at some point; somewhere between death and lost loves and all the heartache, she had changed.
“They’ll be grown, soon,” she says in the soft lilt of her voice as she comes alongside the stranger, her gaze still lingering where the doe and her fawns had disappeared to. “One of the saddest parts about motherhood is that eventually they don’t need you anymore,” she says this as though she has any idea where her own twins are; as if her scattered mind can keep track of anything long enough. She saw them not long ago, she is sure; one black and one white and both of them dripping with the color of the galaxy they had been conceived in. She’d look for them when she leaves here, she thinks.
Her nearly black eyes turn now to the girl next to her, and offers her with a tranquil smile, “I’m Ryatah. I don’t believe we’ve ever met.”
