and my daylight { tiger dp }

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I am a catch of breath. Quick, sharp, in an instant. Sends your chest a burst of fright. Freezing, cold, snap. I'm fighting with everything I have. I'm on fire - burning, burning, burning. Snap, snap, slash, snap. There's no time to over-think this or let my brain fly away. I'm ruthless, calculated, kill kill kill kill kill is all I hear. I bear my teeth and growl - lion heart ablaze.

I'm setting myself on fire and yet there's something beneath my skin that's freezing cold.

{to my surprise
and my daylight
i saw sun rise
i saw sunlight}

I'd danced away from their knives (you can't kill me with a weapon I've spent my life mastering) and Dan had grinned at me. I was happy - in that moment. Accepted. I don't think I'd been accepted like that before. I'd smiled back, of course. Teeth grinning and eyes wide. Tiger, Tiger, Tiger. Always smiling. I was always smiling. The calm before the storm. Smiling, smiling, smiling. (I'd thought to myself that I'd like to go out like that: with a grin on my face.) We were going to kill them all because we knew, we understood, we were the best. And that thought made me happy, so I smiled.

{i am nothing
in the dark
and the clouds burst
to show a daylight }

And then I see his eyes and I don't have time to ask what the ice at my throat is because I can only manage a "No-"




Please.

Please.

(Please don't steal me away.)

{and the sun shines
on this daylight
i realise i couldn't
live without it}

I don't realise until it's happened.

I've exploded.

I burst from my body and the wonders my sister described that lay beneath my head fall into existence. Gold and silver and shining explosions pour from my figure and I am a never-ending stream of laughter. Weightless, existing in everything and nothing, I am pulled up to the sky in a rush of delight. There's a hundred thousand billion thoughts running through the air and I dance on their syllables and twirl through clouds and they carry me upwards to a safe haven beyond. (I see the colours my big sister would whisper about - they're beautiful, all of them, every word and phrase and tone an ocean of red and blue and everything in-between.) And it's as if I've been set free from the skull that almost drove me insane and I am tumbling through an eternity of everything that my head was too small to contain.

The others dissolve from my view and I try to reach out and grab them, to take them away from the fight and to carry them with me, but I'm too happy and there's too many thoughts and I realise that right now I don't have hands. I float away, hopping through the wind, climbing the clouds and becoming infinite.

I dance, laugh, forgive . I am happy - though I think I should be sad. That's for later, however. Right now I spin and dance and I am just a soul in the sky. I see years pass in a heartbeat. I have dived into a fraction of a millisecond and there are no rushing thoughts that pound through my head because I have been set free. They carry me up towards the sky above and I see stars, a hundred thousand billion, all exploding at once too. The light gets darker until there's only a speckle of it trickling through my wonder-show of existence (if I could take a breath I would) and we plunge into the darkness of non-existence.

(It's okay, though. I'm still smiling.)

{at a full tilt
and at full flight
you see darkness
in the daylight}

And then I arrive.

This place is wonderful. Something beneath my feet that feels like dirt but isn't - it's softer, warmer, finer - tickles my soles. I scrunch up my face and curl my toes and decide that I rather like it here, wherever this is. There's an ocean - a real life ocean - something from picture books and photographs, and all of a sudden I am barreling towards the shallows with glee and cartwheeling through the foamy tides. I laugh and it echoes everywhere - from the horizon, from the sky, bouncing around me (and I can feel the laughter dripping from the air: warm, warm, warm.) 

I don't know how long I've spent here. Minutes, hours, days. But the sand (somehow I've come to realise what it is) welcomes my hands as they sink into it's gritty  embrace and the waves almost laugh at my dancing and tumbling. Part of me thinks that I could stay here forever, just ocean and I, until I wash away and it carries me home again. (I wonder about home - where is it? Who is it? Do I have a home?) I try to think of it but all I can see is a storm, and as I shudder violently the world I've found does too.

"Don't do that - I'm quite enjoying this sun."

There's a stranger here.

"Who are you?"

She's got mousy-brown hair and grey eyes and seems to have appeared out of nowhere. Her face is pointed to the sun as if she hardly feels its touch and I try to guess her age but it seems impossible. Young features adorn her but she holds herself as if she's been here an awful long time.

Shaking her head, she looks at me and smiles (I like that, people who smile.) "Doesn't matter," she sighs. Her voice sounds like wisdom and forests. "You're the important one - I've been waiting for someone to show up here for a while now."

"Who am I again?"

This time she laughs. "Why you're Tiger, of course. And not just any tiger, you're the Tiger."

Sixteen years fall into my skeleton and everything makes sense.

"Oh," I breathe. "Oh."

I think-

There's someone-

I didn't get to-

"Artemis!" I cry - except I'm not laughing anymore. This hurts. (The stranger holds my hand and I wonder if she's done this before.)

"She's still here. They're all still here." For some reason my eyes won't cry and when the stranger looks at me I don't hurt anymore. It's a bit like looking in a mirror, like looking at yourself as you fall into the same traps over and over again. She knows. She understands. She must do.

"Here. Let me show you my stars."

{and the sun shines
on this daylight
i realise i couldn't
part without it}

They are quite beautiful.

"My brothers and sister, from before" she announces, pointing to a cluster in the sky. "And from after." Her finger shifts to three more, one brighter than all the others. Curiosity gets the better of me but she seems to answer almost all of my questions (I still don't know her name or how she knows mine) so I ask her anyway.

"Why's that one brighter?" Our backs lie on the white sand banks and my fingers join hers above our heads atop of outstretched arms. She smiles, transported for a moment, eyes not moving from the brightest star in the sky.

"Because he created this place just for me."

"He?"

She says no more about him.

"Look," she announces instead, "there's yours, too."

Names rush through the sky as they appear above us. Ariadne, Dustyn, Bette.  Dan and Jem and Gavin, too. And the brightest of them all: Artemis.

"Can I see them?" I ask, a longing in my words. "As more than just stars?"

"Sometimes" she replies, eyes fixed to the sky. "If we're allowed. I brush past their faces every so often. His, more than most. But not today."

I smile and say nothing for a while. We lie in the sun and watch the stars, mine twinkling in the summer sky. "Can we stay here forever?" I ask after a while.

"Yes, and no. You've got to go to the forever first. Then we can come back and visit as much as we'd like."

"The forever? Isn't this it?"

She laughs, but it's alright, because it's warm. "No, Tiger. This is my in-between. Ours now, I suppose." 

"Mine too?"

"Of course. Look - the sand is mine. The sun is yours. It was never here before you arrived. We had light, and blue skies, and the beach and the waves - but never a sun. If you'd like to share, of course."

I beam and the in-between becomes a little brighter. I am the sun -  I am the sun - and I'll shine down on them forever.

"I'd like that quite a bit."

(We are the universe - endless, and full of light.)

"Then forever we shall go."

I smile. The stranger takes my hand.

"I'm Aria, by the way."

And we, and all our stars, shine on into forever.

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