what the cicadas don't understand [shelby; day three]
Mar 24, 2017 22:21:34 GMT -5
Post by heather - d2 [mylee] on Mar 24, 2017 22:21:34 GMT -5
You travel alone
Without fellow heart, mind or soul
In the dark of the night
Tired eyes losing sight
Hoping to find once again
The light that’s within
Heavy soul of your own
Ever-wearing thin.
Scarlett’s cannon kept ringing hours after her body had left my field of vision. Peculiar enough, I was absolutely certain that any sound made past that exact moment in time sounded identical to the same. For this reason, I walked with my head down and my hands covering my ears for as long as I could manage. Finally, my arms had grown sore and my hands heavy and I had been forced to drop them back to my side and walk alone in my own silence and the world’s opening hymn.
There is no rest for the righteous, but whatever becomes of the wicked?
When silence finally finds me as the sun sets, I collapse to the ground, wrapping my arms around my knees and bringing myself to the smallest position possible. I cannot seem to find the balance on the spectrum that fluctuates between the deafening and the deaf. Stuck in limbo I find myself yearning for the company of Cha— of Scarlett and Lazarus and Raven— of him.
He had seemed to never appear except during the nights when I had fallen so far I could no longer see the precipice looming overhead. It was though he could sense the exact moment when my reasoning gave way to desperation and my strong tongue fell flat to pleas for any type of affection.
It did not take his absence to know that I never did love him. He simply never said it, and neither did I. We were both sinners— immoral, bloodstained, and never fearful of consequences— but we were not liars. The silence that sat between us was the yearning to feed the other sweet words tinged with sugar, but it came to pass that neither of us could bear the taste on our tongue. Bitter truths were all we could swallow.
Perhaps that is why the taste of Scarlett’s blood still dried on my lips does not bring me any fear. Underneath my nails is a mix of dirt and dried blood, remnants of what I had lost today and what she had returned to.
I was raised to be a woman who admired the beauty when it could be labeled as such, whether it came in the color of the sky or the soft touch of a caring hand.
I have lived to be a woman who thinks beauty is just another word for lust we would like to deem as societally normal.
Though the sun had been standing high at attention for as long as my mind could remember, I could not draw back into the realm of my short term memory to recall when it set. It seemed that suddenly that day had dropped to night, and anyone experiencing it was left to pick up the pieces.
Regardless of whether or not I desired the task, it was now mine to undertake, and as I sat with my fingertips dancing in the glass, the light reflected from them and created the picture of the capitol’s mantra on the blankest of dark canvases.
Past the music the faces and names of the dead began to follow one another in making their lost presence known for only a moment and then retreating back into naïve remembrance.
Eight passed and I had not shed a tear, had not heard my heart drop or my mind stop but suddenly the ninth takes rightful place and I am once again paralyzed.
Scarlett’s face had once again lit up my field of vision, and I could not bear to shut my eyes and pretend she did not exist. Instead I held my gaze steady with hers and apologized, a stray tear picking up her blood and dropping from my chin.
I wanted to wake up and not remember that she had ever existed.
Instead with the morning sun I am met not only with the thought of her but the celestial sketch of her face, the points of her existence still outlined like that was where she was always meant to reside. But it could not be the truth, for she was supposed to be here, with me, keeping stride as I trudged from the uneven ground of the salt flats to a forest of vibrant color.
Watching the ground beneath my feet provides me with no reprieve from the strain placed on my eyes from the change of scenery. There was no transition ground on which to prepare myself for the shift of the spectrum from dull to absolutely vivid.
If I was a woman who thought the world had anything beautiful to show me, I would have been speechless.
However, with one moment of ignorance passed, I find myself physically shutting my jaw now fallen open, “What the absolute fuck.”
A creature, lumbering and unamused with its current surroundings, was moving towards me with no motives to show for. Fear and confusion had collided in my stomach, and I could only stand in place as it moved towards me. As it got closer, my eyes widened as I found myself staring into the contents of its stomach with only a sheet of glass separating me from one man’s treasure.
I thought that with the mindset it seemed to posses it would leave me be, passing by with not a second thought to my relatively small presence in comparison, but it stops, less than half a foot from my face and waits, as though I owe it something or anything in between.
Disbelief setting in, I reach out to lay a trembling hand on it’s head, quietly taking hold of the whip again and pulling the slip knot once used to contain the hands of Asriel and extend it until I find it estimated to be around the size of the creature’s neck.
Reaching out, I keep one hand in place for comfort and stability as I slowly move the whip towards it, whispering quietly as I see Scarlett’s blood on my hand for the first time since sunrise, “I think we’ve both lost something quite important.”
S H E L B Y • L E V I A N E |
[shelby attempts to pet and leash the noot noot]
[please don't kill me]
[please don't kill me]