She is afraid, but she hides it so carefully behind a learned hardness she wears in her eyes, a mask that she’s spent days practicing in watery reflections. There is little she knows of this world, but she does know that emotion is weakness, that feelings create holes and vulnerabilities, gaps in an armor she has worked so hard to reinforce. She knows that it is lonely to be an orphan, and that maybe it is even worse to have been deliberately left behind. So she pretends that her parents are definitely dead, and she pretends so well that sometimes their imagined selves meet death in different ways in the realm of her nightmarish sleep.
But they have to be dead, whoever they are or were, because if they aren’t, then she must be wrong in some unforgivable way. Wrong enough that when she was born and first opened those luminous rust eyes, they felt only the absence of love. Felt nothing, perhaps.
She shies away from those thoughts though, feeling those ancient fissures yawning like mouths on the surface of her heart. She is enough, and maybe her parents are out there right now looking for her and missing her so desperately. Dreaming about their gemstone child with sunsets trapped in the shades of her shining coat. They wonder how she is and where she is, what she’s doing and when they’ll be able to hold her again like these other parents hold their children.
She blinks, looking around the field with a wary kind of uncertainty that comes from the way seeing families together makes her chest ache and her stomach hurt - because she knows in her heart that she is not missed, that she is not lost. There is not a single memory in her mind of any dad. He has no face and no voice and no smell. He is only a word, barbed and buried to the hilt in her chest. But maybe it’s worse that she does remember mother. That sometimes she finds a particular shade of purple in the flowers and wild fruit, and a sense of loss and longing washes over her. It becomes suddenly easier, and harder, to remember the way her mulberry fur had smelled like damp earthy morning, or the way her whiskers had tickled Hypatia’s little face when she cleaned the milk from around her muzzle.
Sometimes her armor slips and she forgets to be hard, and then she is lost in these spells of remembering, curling up around her legs like it’ll help trap the memories in close where they’ll stop escaping, stop fading. But instead the memories shift and change, growing and becoming adjacent versions of their original selves. She thinks she can remember that same mulberry mare whispering I love you and chasing birds with her through fields of pale yellow flowers. She can remember coming home to a father whose face is different every time she closes her eyes to find him. But his eyes are always kind and his smile is always warm. And perhaps it makes this loss worse, that beyond mourning her lost family, she mourns the loss of what never was. Of a dream.
Her eyes are more guarded now as she looks around a busy meadow soaked in the pinks and oranges of sunset. She realizes how very much she doesn’t want to be here, how it hurts to stand alone and try to look unbroken, because to everyone else she will undoubtedly be that poor little orphan in varying tones of pity and senseless empathy. She winces, and the expression shifts into a seamless scowl as she lifts her chin to turn those flame eyes elsewhere. To the sun itself, or the tallest branches of the nearest trees, to the leaves and the birds and the blessed things that pay her no notice. It is a tricky balance to want to be both simultaneously invisible, and found by someone who might learn to love you.
But they have to be dead, whoever they are or were, because if they aren’t, then she must be wrong in some unforgivable way. Wrong enough that when she was born and first opened those luminous rust eyes, they felt only the absence of love. Felt nothing, perhaps.
She shies away from those thoughts though, feeling those ancient fissures yawning like mouths on the surface of her heart. She is enough, and maybe her parents are out there right now looking for her and missing her so desperately. Dreaming about their gemstone child with sunsets trapped in the shades of her shining coat. They wonder how she is and where she is, what she’s doing and when they’ll be able to hold her again like these other parents hold their children.
She blinks, looking around the field with a wary kind of uncertainty that comes from the way seeing families together makes her chest ache and her stomach hurt - because she knows in her heart that she is not missed, that she is not lost. There is not a single memory in her mind of any dad. He has no face and no voice and no smell. He is only a word, barbed and buried to the hilt in her chest. But maybe it’s worse that she does remember mother. That sometimes she finds a particular shade of purple in the flowers and wild fruit, and a sense of loss and longing washes over her. It becomes suddenly easier, and harder, to remember the way her mulberry fur had smelled like damp earthy morning, or the way her whiskers had tickled Hypatia’s little face when she cleaned the milk from around her muzzle.
Sometimes her armor slips and she forgets to be hard, and then she is lost in these spells of remembering, curling up around her legs like it’ll help trap the memories in close where they’ll stop escaping, stop fading. But instead the memories shift and change, growing and becoming adjacent versions of their original selves. She thinks she can remember that same mulberry mare whispering I love you and chasing birds with her through fields of pale yellow flowers. She can remember coming home to a father whose face is different every time she closes her eyes to find him. But his eyes are always kind and his smile is always warm. And perhaps it makes this loss worse, that beyond mourning her lost family, she mourns the loss of what never was. Of a dream.
Her eyes are more guarded now as she looks around a busy meadow soaked in the pinks and oranges of sunset. She realizes how very much she doesn’t want to be here, how it hurts to stand alone and try to look unbroken, because to everyone else she will undoubtedly be that poor little orphan in varying tones of pity and senseless empathy. She winces, and the expression shifts into a seamless scowl as she lifts her chin to turn those flame eyes elsewhere. To the sun itself, or the tallest branches of the nearest trees, to the leaves and the birds and the blessed things that pay her no notice. It is a tricky balance to want to be both simultaneously invisible, and found by someone who might learn to love you.
HYPATIA
i want to break these bones until they're better