10-23-2021, 12:01 PM
Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.
Elli has spent so long trying to be a seed carried by the wind that she has forgotten she was supposed to be looking for a place to grow roots. Now she does not know how to stop — does not know how to slow herself down, or stop looking for the in-between things that most people dismiss. She does not know how to be anything but a contradiction.
A branch hangs down too low, in front of glacier cut blue eyes and she is almost startled by the beauty of it. Po once told her a story about gifting autumn leaves. That it is a sign of letting go, of being willing to go to places the wind would like to show you. To give someone an autumn leaf is to say you have found peace in whatever it is that plagues you. It had not been autumn when she had left Terrastella. If it had been, she would have filled the whole of Dusk Court with oranges and yellows and reds.
If she were still a gangly newborn, she would have thought him born from a tree when he appears before her from the shadows. He looks the part and at that age she had owned the imagination to think of such. She is startled and it is only seen the slight widening of blue eyes and a quiver of her nose. ‘Would you like to be a dead thing?’ She was asked by a unicorn in the forest. But he is no unicorn and this is not a forest made of redwoods. But there is a prayer that settles in her eyes when she looks at him.
She is twilight and stardust where he is a sunny forest and daydreams. He is stunning and unique in all the ways she could never be. Never has she wanted to reach out and touch someone so badly, but a the same time restrain herself because there is some sort of trembling fear rising like canyon walls in her chest that he could very well not be real. And instead just be some sort of forest spirit that only appears to lost little girls.
“Maybe it is the same thing that convinces a child that a puddle is an ocean and a patch of dirt a desert,” she speaks like she is not still a child herself, that she is something far older, far wiser. Elliana thinks she has seen the color of his eyes in the blades of grass beside the river.
The mountains rise like spires behind them and the forest and the grasses each whisper in the wind stories that only she remembers. Her steps are light-as-air as she begins to walk, blue eyes fastening themselves to him, an invite as any for him to stay with her. “Somewhere,” she finishes his sentence with an inhale synchronous with his own exhale. She leans towards him, shoulders not quite touching, but close enough to welcome him into her circle, even if she is the only one residing within it. “What do you think it will look like? Somewhere?” She asks him, her voice as silvery and as breathy as her mother’s had been at this age.
“I’m Elliana—Elli. I come from far away.”
A branch hangs down too low, in front of glacier cut blue eyes and she is almost startled by the beauty of it. Po once told her a story about gifting autumn leaves. That it is a sign of letting go, of being willing to go to places the wind would like to show you. To give someone an autumn leaf is to say you have found peace in whatever it is that plagues you. It had not been autumn when she had left Terrastella. If it had been, she would have filled the whole of Dusk Court with oranges and yellows and reds.
If she were still a gangly newborn, she would have thought him born from a tree when he appears before her from the shadows. He looks the part and at that age she had owned the imagination to think of such. She is startled and it is only seen the slight widening of blue eyes and a quiver of her nose. ‘Would you like to be a dead thing?’ She was asked by a unicorn in the forest. But he is no unicorn and this is not a forest made of redwoods. But there is a prayer that settles in her eyes when she looks at him.
She is twilight and stardust where he is a sunny forest and daydreams. He is stunning and unique in all the ways she could never be. Never has she wanted to reach out and touch someone so badly, but a the same time restrain herself because there is some sort of trembling fear rising like canyon walls in her chest that he could very well not be real. And instead just be some sort of forest spirit that only appears to lost little girls.
“Maybe it is the same thing that convinces a child that a puddle is an ocean and a patch of dirt a desert,” she speaks like she is not still a child herself, that she is something far older, far wiser. Elliana thinks she has seen the color of his eyes in the blades of grass beside the river.
The mountains rise like spires behind them and the forest and the grasses each whisper in the wind stories that only she remembers. Her steps are light-as-air as she begins to walk, blue eyes fastening themselves to him, an invite as any for him to stay with her. “Somewhere,” she finishes his sentence with an inhale synchronous with his own exhale. She leans towards him, shoulders not quite touching, but close enough to welcome him into her circle, even if she is the only one residing within it. “What do you think it will look like? Somewhere?” She asks him, her voice as silvery and as breathy as her mother’s had been at this age.
“I’m Elliana—Elli. I come from far away.”