To me, it was the way she was careful with words. They were her children, she nestled them to her chest and lulled them to sleep. It had always been the words to hurt her, cleaving her flesh from bone, slicing her cheeks, burning her tongue. It had always been the words to save her. She burrowed deep within the pages, snuggling up against dreams of escaping this place. Everywhere she went, she took the words with her, both the careless, angry type to muck about her insides, tearing down tapestries and throwing freshly baked cookies in the trash, and the beautiful, delicate words, the type to lounge about pillows and talk greedily amongst themselves about how the sun made them look when he bathed them in his likeness. In this way, the girl thought of herself as a home for the words.
It was the way she collected things, too. She used to tell me stories from before she was starstruck- how she and her brother and her little tot of a sister used to get lost in the woods looking for trash and calling it treasure. They dug up bottles and jars and buckets, and I could almost imagine the shine in their eyes as they uncovered the next artifact of their growing collection. She told me how they cleaned and placed each new prize with utmost care, lining up the bottles from smallest to largest and spacing the jars out equally. I remember how her eyes looked when she told me these stories, like she was so far away and wished to go home.
The adventures of her youth always seemed to shy away from something bigger. I could tell by the way her eyes grew dark when she spoke of them, like clouds had rolled over her horizons and were threatening her with bouts of thunder and flashes of lightning. Occasionally, you could tell that the clouds had won, for the rain washed forward on her cheeks. There was a way that she cried, like the very air around her stunk of pain. Like her very being would crumple. She simply bled sorrow.
This is a girl who struggles to fight her past. She sees it everywhere she goes: in the people, in the darkness, in the smell of cigarettes. Her ties to the past keep her hidden, like a caged bird. She craves the nighttime air, the bustling city streets, and the adventure she knows lays beyond these things- but her past claws her down, and her real self slips down through her shoes.
I think the way she looks at the sky is beautiful, like this all is temporary and she knows she’ll go back someday. I can see her in the clouds when she smiles up at them, lounging effortlessly, the mist making her hair wild. I can see how she misses the moon, the pain reflected in her eyes, the love curling its way along her lips. She used to tell me that she fell from a star, and I could almost believe her for the way her body aches when she speaks of the nighttime.
She asks me why the people she loves never love her back. She asks me why the love in her life is always so twisted, so impure. She tells me she aches all alone, that despite all the ones who tell her that she is kind, she is fascinating, she is funny, despite all the words she just feels so. alone. I don’t know how to tell her that her love is like the flowers. I don’t know how to say that her love is like the trees. How can I tell her that her love is like a breeze that makes you shiver but warms every part of you? The trees, the flowers, the smell of sunshine in the air, how can these things be loved by one person? How can these things be appreciated by one person? She is meant to be loved by many, but I find it so hard to tell her that.
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