wilting and the wallflower ✞ elverum&duncan blitz

duncan {♔} bowers-fox

Elverum and I had unknowingly sent our friendship past the horizon as we watched Owen’s boat do the same, and there’s an irony to climbing the steps of the justice building again, again for a brother, again for one I loved.

Again for a friend.

And certainly Elverum was just that, for we spent nights upon nights folding pictures into boats and planes and setting them airborne upon sky or sea, and as time passed so did we, so did Owen and Cody and Tweed and Eras and—

Only Owen had passed for good, and now Elverum would do the same.

Maybe I’d be sailing his boat off some time on the waves of a current taking him out to deep waters.

It felt like I was drowning.

For as soon as he stepped forward my voice caught in my throat, and I was thrashing to get away from Cody and Eras and Noah—they aren’t family like he is– trying to get a hold of Tweed so she can remind me that none of this is happening, that she isn’t leaving me at the door of the justice building with a quick kiss to the top of my head, whispering that everything’s all right, that we’re safe, that we’re okay— but Elverum isn’t.

Instead I nod and leave her on the steps, casting another look to her before walking down halls that seem all too familiar, that whisper Owen’s name and it’s the same room, the same walls that heard our last speech that house me again, that welcome me with arms I do not wish to feel and sit me in a chair that’s felt the tears of lovers, siblings and brothers, all torn from who and what they are and love—

“You didn’t have to.”

duncan {♔} bowers-fox

He thinks I can bear the weight of another—that his body collapsing on top of my own doesn’t push my repressed lungs even further from the surface, even further from what they so desperately yearn for.

We were both swimming against the same current, only he was already sinking.

Yet he had had every opportunity to stay afloat, to rest on his laurels of surviving one more year and yet here he was, tying weights to his ankles and wondering why the water rose over his head. It was no surprise the Elverum Troshaldr was sinking, but why was I?

Maybe it was because I was tied to his soul, or Owen to Saffle’s, but for one reason or another I do not shove his body aside but rather wrap my arms about him to the best of my ability, though my fingertips do not touch, almost like our thoughts, for we’ve both got arms outstretched and fingers extended, yet we cannot quite come together, cannot quite reason on the same plane of thought.

“Where is my sister, Duncan, was she out there?”

There consists of many places, but my mind is not one, for up until the point of Elverum’s self-formulated demise, I had been completely entangled in watching Tweed, eyes flicking from the red hair that sunk below the crowd in a staggering reminder of her lack of height and the almost porcelain hand that reached into a bowl of the same, reflecting light in a place where darkness abounded, and it was only when her name stayed silent that I took a breath, for her and the child she carried had been spared of the weight that had been hovering near our heads for a day too many.

Saffle had never crossed the wires of my mind and never had reason to, for she despised me if only for my relation to Owen, if only for my taking him away because he had been some sort of self-proclaimed hero. I had no reason to watch for her glaring eye and clenched fists, and if I had, it was likely I would have been even closer acquainted with the latter than I was now with Elverum, his body pressed against mine like a child pressed against the covers when monsters show their faces in the dead of night.

It’s hesitant—breaking like every piece of our being, from mind to soul and everything in between, but it’s there, floating in the air like a savior from weights that press just a little too heavily, “Of course she was Elverum. But why are you here?”