haywirehay
GIVE IT UP.
She wanted it etched into her skin with a deep dark knife. Maybe she would change, but would likely only remember until the blood stopped flowing.
"I can only see red, anyways."
You will never break free. It will never stop. Stoop. Come walk all over me. It wasn't until she reached the end that she realized she was looking into a mirror.
How do I give up all of myself and become nothing? How do I become someone? How can I? I am drawn.
She told me to be still. I crouched there in the must of the barn, wishing I hadn't turned my heel. Wishing I had waited. Wishing a lot of things, actually.
Smoke was in the air. I tried to breathe deep. Maybe if there was a campfire in my lungs, it would all be over.
Cackling flame brought back memories of another life. Another time. Another person, really. If I could go back to how I was back then, maybe the scales on my eyes would help me burst through, rise up like some great phoenix, and burn the hell out of everything so we could get away.
I think of the little things that slay you. Maybe an unclasped hand, or a forgotten heart. But when I really wrap my mind around it, it's unchecked words or something else that gets to them.
I see it all end the same way so often. But it never really lays the same in my hand, when it's the end of the day, the locker slams, and it echoes because there is no one soft to absorb the sound.
I can take another step, another step, and find myself nowhere. I end in contradictions right where I started. I would give anything for some sort of tell-tale heart.
"Where are they coming from?" I asked in a low, urgent tone.
"Shut up," Laura snarled. She had her fingers curled in her hair, hunched over, she looked completely and violently ill. But her eyes were glowing that fierce red, and my hair stood on edge. She was deeper beyond the Veil than I had ever seen her go. How far could she see, with the Sight? There was no way to tell.
I heard an echoing shout in the room to our left. Laura's eyes snapped back to normal. She rose to her feet, staggered, but I caught her.
"They have us surrounded," she said, bleakly, and I knew all was lost.
"Do you think if I yell loud enough, someone will hear me?" I asked, but I heard only the sound of all the colors.
I thought the rainbow would keep me company, there in the garden, but the only thing that changed was my outlook. I could look up into the sky and see blue, endless blue, and it would stay that way until I decided that the sky could be anything. It could be orange. It could be red.
It could be violet.
"Do not tempt me," I said, then, and instead of fighting the loneliness, I decided to become it.
I reached out with fingertips of frosted ice. When I made contact, something flushed through my body, something warm.
"Is this what it feels like to be adored?" I murmurred.
"No," he said, and he stepped away. "It is what it feels like to be loved."
The difference between the two was something I could not yet comprehend at that point. It would be like trying to explain the difference between rain and water. One could not exist without the other, but with each, a certain element of pressure.
And pressure was something I was used to. I gave him a look. I looked him in the eyes. Could he see through me like a plane of icy glass?
"Well then," I said, with a voice full of certainty. "I love you."
By the time I met you, it was too late in the day to go anywhere else than Fat Mike's Donut Shop. I didn't know where else to go. The probability that you would find me attractive was just too far out of the sphere of my understanding. Math, I understood. Problems, logic, that sort of thing. But what I couldn't understand was a girl with ash-brown hair and bright green eyes who wore big sweatshirts and laughed at the things I said, even when they weren't particularly funny.
You took a bite out of your donut, turned it on its side, and made Pac-Man noises.
Impossible. This couldn't be happening. You were everything.
There was something off about the way that he was looking at me. The more I stared at him, the more his face seemed to melt, and his features seemed to blend together into a pot of emotions, feelings, and memories. I wanted nothing more than to look away, but I couldn't. People talk about freight trains, crashes, that sort of thing when they say they couldn't look away, but with this -- I really just felt stuck.
I was going to die this way, wasn't I? Staring into the face of the unknown horror, fearing beyond fear itself that I would find some of myself in his mess.
I never meant to start before the stop was set in place. I found nothing to hold me back there at the starting block, save for the lead feeling in my heart that ran all the way to the soles of my feet. Ready. Ready. Set. Set. Stay, hold on a moment. Did I leave the stove on at home? What a thing to think of at this moment, on the break of everything. Flood the engine of your heart, stop and stay a while. No. We are just seconds away from erupting into a gale of force, into a ball of physics, into a breadbowl of energy.
There was something slightly off about that afternoon. It was almost like I had slipped down the rung of a rather unforgiving ladder. Everything felt slanted sideways, shifted slightly to either the left or the right. Ten degrees off of Okay. That's how I would have described it.
"What's wrong?" said he.
"Nothing," said I, but it was a lie.
I think we concluded the day's festivities with the ding of the bell. The harsh sort of bell, not the pleasant, melodic one. I realized in that moment the price of being tardy when it comes to matters of the heart.
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