I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
Please, she had said once and then swallowed it whole.
Once, hope had carved out the cavern of her chest and made its home there where her heart ought to have been.
It is strange to remember these things. In gasps and glimpses, trembling things that she catches like marbles between her teeth. She holds them on her tongue because there is no room left in her chest. Because her ribs ache with the effort it takes to hold in all the hurt. And she hangs her weary head and thinks again about finding someplace else to go. She imagines someplace quiet, someplace warm. Someplace she won’t miss when it’s gone.
She thinks of her father sometimes, even still. Wonders where he’d gone, wonders (foolishly) if she could find him if she tried hard enough. But she is but a girl, idiot girl, and so she stays in one place. Because she does not have it in her to try and it’s all become too heavy to carry. There are stones where her heart ought to be – a whole pile of them, black and smooth, their edges weathered by the sadness she has never been able to shake.
She remembers Velkan saying once that his mother was near, that he had not seen her but he’d smelled her. She caught a breath of something a few days ago, something that tasted like a memory that she didn’t have a home for. A memory that lived, not inside of her head, but outside of it. A memory that had belonged to her once, certainly, but had long since abandoned whatever space it had ever occupied inside of her. Her father, she thought, and then remembered that she was a stupid girl. It was not her father, of course. Merely something that dredged up something in her that she couldn’t remember ever owning.
She wanders now because she feels no desire to return to Sylva. Because Brigade is gone and there was never much of anything for her there anyway. She does not meander down to the edge of the river, though she longs to cast herself into the water and surrender herself to the pull of the current. She is tired, Lilian. So dreadfully tired.
She does not bother to return to the Field. She goes instead to the forest where she had encountered a monster once and not thought to be frightened. Perhaps she will find another, she thinks, something that will spark an ember of something in her. Because she is tired and she is numb and hope had carved out the cavern of her chest once but it left a long time ago, too.
lilian
