{purple veins} stella, dp

It doesn’t hurt.

I don’t know what solace I had expected to find in death – whether I expected a spattering of rain droplets trickling down my window pane or gloomy trees hanging low, so low that the withered leaves kissed the ground from time to time when the chill of Winter blew through the solemn branches, (because I was meant to die peacefully at home, safe, and feeling oh-so sorry for myself; not to die like this, in the darkness and a foreign place with a foreigner.) But there was one unexpected conclusion that had emerged from my open wounds and that was that it didn’t hurt to die. It didn’t hurt any more than the past five days and five nights had hurt me, battered me, torn me down to nothing but the shadow of a sinking skeleton.

It’s okay.

It’s okay that I need to lay down my axe because I can’t find the strength to hold it any longer, because I’m not hurting, just flying. Letting go of the few ties that still somehow bound me to this world. Weightless, yet grounded, and whilst soaring is breathtaking it is just as terrifying to let go. I’m thankful for the leverage the axe adds to my fleeting heart, but I can feel strength leaving me as effortlessly as that love I’d once held for Finn was seeping through every pore of my body.

That’s okay.

It’s a metronomic drone of reassurance, keeps me from drowning in all my losses – so many I stopped counting long before this Hell – and lets me breathe through these tarnished lungs laced with fibres of butterfly wings.

And it’s okay.

----

I’m not very well.

I’ve never been anything less than incomplete, a mess of half-formed thoughts and mumbled words nobody ever seemed to acknowledge. Unwell, and when the scents of apple and homesickness never seemed to match the scenes of bleeding suns and cracking death – scenes my soul became attached to – it was easy, almost, to convince myself that something wasn’t right. There has been heartache and abandonment and death, too much of it, and when life stops the world does not cease for those who fall behind.

We pick up. We stand up again, call to any friends we’ve managed to acquire and keep close to us, and continue our march.

It bothers me to not be able to do any of those things, in this moment.

Vulnerable, without words nor weapon which has done greater damage in my lifetime is a question I’ll probably never find the answer to there’s no reason for him to do nothing other than lie down beside me, his spear discarded to be replaced with the knife he stole.

Yet we are here.

We breathe the same air, damp, with a metallic scent of mercury, (lightning in my fingers, I feel the buzz and I don’t know what it means or if it’s anything more than paranoia but it’s wholly human) combined as one as another heartbeat is stapled to the wall, a collection of stolen sentiments.

Crusader beats within my chest and I so desperately want to reach up to the pocket beside my heart and find the crumpled photograph he gave me – to hold onto it and not let go even though he let me go too many times to count and now he’s just another stolen heart and this chest isn’t mine anymore because it’s trapped too many people to truly be mine, be more than anything except a rotten home – because family was important, and if all mine were gone already, nothing left of them, nothing but dead names, I don’t think Crusader would mind me finding a place within his.

I’d miss him.

There’s an ‘X’ on my hip that he finds with his knife as simply as he’d found our escape in the mess of celestial pinpricks of a stolen map, navigating the waters of the darkness, drowning in the blood of our losses. Searching, forever searching.

I find it in the stars overhead.

A sailboat.

A tiny hand, effortlessly tracing the sky, grasped between one much wiser, much warmer (why did we leave you? Why did we run?). She was meant to look after us; it was safer, with Cha. But we’d left, and we’d been thieves and liars and loved each other like we should have loved her and between her map and her heart I don’t know which crime was the greater, but it hurts.

Her warmth fades as blood leaves my own body – a hand suspended in time, tracing glowworms, that’s all they used to be, and it’s no easier to navigate the lights, but to keep staring up at them, fragments of starlight reflected like the abundance of glittering constellations she reminded me so much of, gives me a faint sense of succor I don’t want to let go of. Not just yet.

A tiny hand, effortlessly tracing the sky, grasped between one much harder, much colder. Still here, ‘I won’t leave you in this darkness, not again.’

I’m left with a killer, yet so much more than that.

I can’t see his eyes, I don’t want to see them I want to see them so desperately.

I can’t speak, he doesn’t deserve any more words I wish I could say more to somehow make this better.

There are moments suspended in time that we hold on to. I have no more than a handful – barely counted on five fingers – and two of them were with Finn. Yesterday, in the caverns after fleeing like the cowards we are, where we’d danced like the children we were, not like the killers we’d become.

And now, is another.

It could last forever – it almost feels like the silence is supposed to be everlasting, with promises hanging in the air, not yet forgotten. The stinging at my hip is a dull pain, and maybe slow death is far worse than one so quick, but for the number of times I have run back and forth between love and hate to land on love one final time, I’m grateful for this exhausting sliver of last minute life. Fingers, interlocked, just like they should have been, all along, I can’t bring myself to let go, never will. I’d never meant to cry, but I bury my head into his side and wait for silent sobs to subside, and I don’t know how I know that the last thing I saw was a beacon of light from a faltering flashlight placed gently by my head, but it’s enough.

There’s no more darkness.

And maybe this is just freedom.

It doesn’t hurt so much.

I never liked pain.

Don’t let go, Finn.

I’m going home, Finn.

I’ve lost one three seven eight nine hearts in here.

It’s enough.

----

Water runs silver like a poison not dissimilar to that beneath these painted bones. The surface a mirror, and the face that stares back at me is an unsalvageable wreck of a molted shell of the girl nobody had known. I don’t know if a few lost souls who picked my name up along their journeys really matter, if they ever did. There are no sounds, no billowing winds to bring heat to shaking coffins. No smiles, no tears – the only two emotions that meant anything to me.

It’s nothing like home. I don’t belong here.

I don’t mind it.

‘You outlived me, little sister.’

Turning away from the edge of the water (it’s not water) (it can’t hurt me anymore), you can’t help the motion of a spinning head that sends brown hair longer than you could remember it ever being flying in wisps around your face, each strand that presses into your eyes a stinging kiss of the hearts that had been lost to find yourself here, under a starless sky and nothing but a forgotten map engraved into your skull to navigate the darkness.

Belle.

And there is so much I could say to her, if only my tonsils weren’t alight and I still had the capacity to form tangible phrases – an ability lost with the ripping of vocal chords, and oh god, it feels so bittersweet to have lost even more of myself than I’d ever thought to gain, losing every single part of myself to the skies that hammer my mind with faceless whispers, yet even as masks I see their tears, falling, glittering, shattering and fading with those stupid promises they’ll never get to fulfil.

I wrote you letters, thousands of them – I left them suspended in my head so you could read them – but you never replied.

You never replied.

You left me here.

A soft laugh.

‘I never did enough for you.’

That’s not true, though.

‘It wasn’t just me that left you. We were both alone long before I left.’

Names flashing, they’re the beacons of zipping white lights, fabled hearts, mum and dad and Finn, always Finn.

‘It’s okay. We’ll find a new home. We’ll make a new life.’

Behind her is a glittering lake of mercury; behind me is a glittering river of blue. Nothing but liquid, drowning years of pain and nights of horrors, mirages of fields that resemble something I once called home, and yet now cannot bring myself to label them as. Four lifetimes ago, Calloway was nothing. A name and nothing more – no attachments, no elicited emotional responses, and whilst we pretended it was fine, it’s not a life we’d wanted to belong to.

To leave it, a different story.

To follow, a time of rest.

For now, that sounds like enough.