[private] how can we wake without question

[Selaphiel]

selaphiel

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes

He is made to absorb, just as he had been made to bend instead of break. Each of her feelings sinks bone deep and, though he does not immediately understand their source, he lets them resonate. They echo in the cavern of his chest while she smiles at him, just barely, and he wonders how long he will be able to keep her this time. 

How long now until she flees?
He feels it all and it flits wildly through the network of his veins but he feels these things biggest: nervousness that belongs to him alone, worry that has been his only constant companion. There is something else, too, something just out of reach. A thing that he does not have a name for and there’s no way to tell if it belongs to him at all.

She answers and then she laughs so warmly that it could almost thaw all that ice inside him. He watches her, the way the light moves across her face, how she seems to glow with the sound of it and feels such a vicious rush of sadness. Such a beautiful thing, he thinks, and he will never touch it.

He shakes his head and insists, “you are.” He blinks at her and then looks away, enveloped still in the lingering warmth of her laughter. And he can almost ignore the stench of death that surrounds them both. (This stench the thing that will keep him from ever touching anything at all, let alone something so beautiful.)

“Are you all right?” he asks quietly, calling to attention the first time their paths crossed, referring to the fact that she has not settled in any one place. He knows what sets a soul to moving and how difficult it can be to stop sometimes. 

I just bite my tongue a bit harder