(no subject)
She tilts her head back, closes her eyes, and swallows.
It still tastes the same - like cold and drowning and fire - and though she knows she needs it, she almost doesn't want it. It's funny, sometimes, how those things aren't always the same.
Lethe sinks and falls to pieces and almost forgets, sometimes, that she needs to breathe.
(It's not such a terribly hard thing to forget. Not even half as much as you would think.)
She does not recall it all being so terribly loud before.
(Something about absence, yes? It makes it fonder louder?)
But these sounds that fill up the spaces. Oh, they echo sweet.
She speaks and her voice is five voices (no, perhaps that's not nearly enough - it's a silly thing to count, really, when there are so many) or perhaps she doesn't speak at all and that's the problem.
Mostly it's just bubbles.
hear no
and if you never say (your name) out loud
see no
to anyone, they can never
speak no evil?
ever call you by it
She dreams (his her their your my our its all every only) life.
She laughs like glass beads and marmalade and lwohvaetd she said to him the day he disappeared and her fingers are blue (or are they his? - and is there a difference?) and the whole world is so strangely sideways when you tilt your head just. this. much.
There are long, slender lines to her throat (and i find myself intrigued by the curves and edges of you) pale like marble and she wonders about scars and stories. And, really, it is more wondering which ones to listen to - there are too many all at once and she has never liked to play favorites.
Here is what I could have
would have
should have said
if I had the words for you.
This is what I am.
__
Imagine that you are in the center of a crowded room - crowded enough to feel the people pressed tight together on all sides. It is very strange because you know that once, maybe not so long ago, it was just your room. Only yours and now there's so much trapped inside of it that you can scarcely breathe.
Now, imagine that slowly - oh so slowly - and then - then all at once - the people start talking. Each and every one of them and they speak loudly because they know - they know that they have to make you hear. That if they are not heard, no one will remember them or their story at all.
And no one wants that. To be forgotten entirely.
So they speak. They whisper in tongues foreign and languages lost - they scream and they sing and they each speak with such conviction that their story is the one you want to hear. And you listen - there is little else to do.
They are stories of imperfect heroes and of the shadow-people that dreamed of light and you treasure them - you keep them safe - and though the words echo and overlap horribly through your skull like war drums, you listen.
You listen and you remember. Because it is your purpose.
__
Water and spindly, little girl limbs and whispers of yesterdays lost - lost to the crash of waves and the whirl of tides, the clash of metal and the roar of fire - lost to brilliant causes and insignificant things all the same.
And she breathes them back in - each and every one - and wonders who keeps her story.
If anyone keeps it at all.
Do you remember me?
(If I asked you to.)
Could you?
(Would you?)
... please?