gravity always wins

“On Sunday, a lambent crevice opened up in the street outside my house.  By Tuesday, birds were flying into it.  ’I probably won’t miss you,’ my mother said. ‘I’m only interested in the end of the world,’ I replied.  Many find it difficult to breathe without the atmosphere, but we knew how.  We just stopped breathing.  We’re at the Moonlight All-Night Diner, and they’re serving up fruit from the plants growing out of the waitress.  The closed sign whispers, ‘Please, don’t touch me.’  We watch bodies fall to the ground outside like deep sea creatures surfacing.  You turn to me and ask, ‘Do you ever think about suicide?’  I look away from you and close my eyes, eat the raspberries to confuse the blood in my mouth.  Now you’re in the only car in the parking lot at midnight and you’re watching me throw stones at the moon, which hangs low in the sky so that he can look into your house.  Your sister tried to touch him from her window once, and he flinched.  Now he and the oceans watch her with a quiet concern. The lilac sky is trying to rest her head on his shoulder, all trees gradually growing through her.  A hummingbird whispers to you, ‘Be careful.  Under her dress is her skin,’ and then builds his nest in the middle of the highway.  I look back to you, and you close your eyes.”

River’s words return in an echo, rippling the serene stillness of the moment. She thinks she sees the sky shiver and Natalie wonders how she’d never let herself be happy with solitary moments like these before. She had spent so long chasing, scratching and piling on new tacks for some semblance of an identity. Spent so long trying to calm the rapid buzz in her chest—smiled so hard and never let it light her eyes. They’re all built on broken pasts which they shovel into shaky foundations of lives they’re building today, and most succeed, she thinks. And if they don’t, they could’ve fooled her. Natalie’s been quivering and shaking on her own flimsy glass beams for a while now, and maybe it was time to let them shatter and break. Maybe they would cut, maybe she would bleed—but she’d be left with the sharp white scent of bleach; a starched, clean slate.

The septic smell reminded her of times forgotten, it was a threatening waft. Empty, wiped clean—no blood in her ledger anymore. This was the chance, she knew that. Natalie had all the tools at her disposal, she could be a new woman if she wanted. No longer a cripple to her thoughts; the only person whose forgiveness she needed was hers. But it was never that easy, she’d never been that brave.

So Natalie would break herself down one by one, take apart the glued on shards of a Natalie far forgotten until she was stripped bare to her core. Until there wasn’t much to pretend, not much to hide—and she would go from there. She would be everything she had never let herself be, everything she had never dared to be.

Nat had never wanted to be the old woman stuck in her past, the one who would hush people from uttering her real age every time the candles on her birthday cake spelled out a larger, and larger number. The woman who would massage gels into her soft skin in hopes of erasing the etches and pulls of time’s embrace. Natalie had been set when she’d decided she would age gracefully, set before she even knew just what it would mean. But she’d forgotten that promise when the stars had fallen. She’d shriveled and curled back into a bud, retracting and holding onto any root of memory that reminded her of something solid—because hell, now the ground was shaking under her too and the sky was cracking and leaking broken stars. She’d retracted into a bud, folding her petals and curling in while keeping the deep blush—keeping the smiles, the jokes, the memories of a time forgotten, the weight of a pain long gone. She was meant to bloom and she had failed, but she wasn’t high and mighty enough to not let herself have the small pleasure of ‘better late than never’.

Starting over now? Better late than never. Better now when she owed nothing to anyone, than never. Better now before her life stretched behind her, than never. Better now with little people around to be collateral damage, than never.

River is not reprimanding or degrading, a touch of genuine concern coloring her words. Nat smiles in return as she tilts the stick in her hand and considers it, a slow nod following. “Yeah.” She agrees. There are worse things in the world, there are other times more suited to care. “Can’t find the energy to deny myself now. One smoke won’t kill me,” she says. And even if it does, if it does, it would not come at a more opportune time. A time when she was being most honest and leaving the least behind.

She turns back to face the blonde, her gaze landing still on a beautiful sight as an easy smile settles on her lips. It’s light and breezy, and it doesn’t feel heavy at all. She glances down her frame before taking another drag and letting out, light and breezy as the smile and the cold night’s wind—but her eyes stop at the gleaming red flowing from her hand. Nat perches forward, eyes squinting—unsure whether the blinking stars above were playing with her sight. But the red is stark against River’s paler complexion, and Natalie’s gaze reaches for River’s again. “River…I, I think you’re bleeding.” And her hand is reaching for her companion’s in attempt to assure she’s right, though hoping she’s not.

River laid rapture at her feet the moment she stepped, feet bare and toes moving between dewy grass. There were some rules, set in place in this place that thought itself entitled to governance. And the real girl had swarmed herself at its walls and knocked them down with  a careless breath so simply that it had hardly remembered her ghost -- let along recognized that its authority was null. Unwilling. Unworthy.

Something weak that spread itself thin in high, shaky vibrato notes and asked 'Will you allow me charge?' 

And she had said no. And she had meant nothing beyond the 'n' and the 'o' and the way they had formed together into some solid something at the leaving of her lips. The way they had tasted like finality, and how finality had been something of wrecked rubble in soot stuck to the bottom of someone's shoe. They were her sounds and hers alone and no world and no system and no man could repeat them back at her and feel their effects rumbling in his belly. She'd counted to thirty-eight and breathed in cracked night sky air, and stepped. 

And with each footprint breaking pattern of perfectly-laid grass, she planted seeds stuck beneath the heels of her feet and buried into the ground. She'd remembered what it felt like to walk and to feel empty space leak out from the thick skin there like glass had been beneath them and glass had cut through her and she had embraced the feeling because it had been her own doing. She had leaked and leaked and leaked out that which diluted her, leaving it in pretty strands on the grass until she was pure. And filled. And easy to find in the space inside of her leg. In the language of scars inside her mouth. In the brief moments. The waiting. The now.

This now felt beautiful. Held her up so high and close to her sky that she had not remembered how lonely it was without her loving it so. That only thing that she knew those words into some concept of reality: this sky, all open and waiting and completely her own. And this girl was here speaking and she knew that it must matter or she would not have allowed it to interrupt, but she lifted her hand nevertheless. Dropped glass shard to the ground with what she had because this fountain in her hand had been enough. And she could tell. 

Her finger rippled the sky broken through until stars of her own appeared, slow. Wandering. Finding their home in a meandering gaze as her fingers traced them along their constellation. Found them their path -- something new that she had not drawn before.

"Do you know what will kill you?" Because her mouth sounded so sure. Because River had never bothered to ask her sky or her death what thing would bring the end to these that suffered and survived. She dipped her clean fingers of her left hand into the blood of her right. And she turned clockwise. Studied her canvas.

It was not often that the monotony of every day life in the colony was broke, especially for someone like Logan. A mere survivor, deluded, security class 2 Torren - on paper it might look exciting but more often than not she would have to seek out her own means of entertainment. If not teasing guards, or pranking elites, then sneaking off to dark corners to with a bottle of watered down alcohol to pass the time away. Sometime she found others to help pass the time - Pryor was always up for some trouble making like the good Torren he was. Derrick was great for a chat and a smoke.

Then there were those few moments with J.R. that had somehow managed to cover everything from drunk insults and sparring, to jenga battles and a stolen moment in a janitorial closet like two teenagers playing seven minutes in heaven. Unfortunately all of these moments were barely blips on her otherwise carefully planned out and assigned timetable hand crafted by the colony and sent to here ever morning via PDD right after her alarm went off.

The only other thing in her life was her job as a marine merchant. Once someone she knew had jokingly called her a pirate. Though she thought herself a little more ethical than the actual pirates that roamed the open waters since D-Day and the fall of modern civilization. Not all countries and governments survived to keep a claim on their territories - both on land and sea. Soon many rouge groups and clans who managed to secure seafaring transport took over the waters - the Colony too. And while the Colony used the waters for trade and transport, there was always a potential for danger. Each voyage was taken on with the understanding that not everyone might make it back home safe. If humans did not claim their lives then mother nature and her fierce waters might. Each time they did return, the superstitious said their prayers, while the likes of Logan simply unloaded the ship then returned during the off hour of the day or night to survey the ship and begin repairs.

Day, night, night day - sometimes it was hard to tell the difference for Logan on days like this. Days where she had spent from dusk to dawn, or sometimes pull long arduous shifts locked in the belly of the steel beast that lay slumbering in the bay of Colony 22. The ship she had come to call her other home. She had spent a good few hours making herself acquainted with a soldering iron in the ships hull, and now tired, she walked quietly back to the dorms through the quiet Colony grounds, the rest of the merchant already a head of her. She noticed the woman standing with her face turned up to sky, she would have ignored it entirely, moved on like ships passing in the night. But the woman spoke, her words eerily accurate.

….”What?” the single word tumbling from her lips. 

It was in the uncertainty of these moments that River left herself stranded in the hull of a body meant to house what had broken free. That often chill of the memory of a life in debt -- she had scrubbed from her skin with determination that left her raw and aching. Like touch had been what she was not built for. Like wandering blistered and red could stop this skin from hands and air and the scrape of falling leaves when she stood beneath those few trees still teeming with obscurity named life.

In was in the soft ache of this memory that she wondered to herself if that intentional burn had not been meant to replicate that kind fire she had known once upon a time, for so many years, and then nothing. No one had ever known anything enough about the real girl to put together a story; but anyone with eyes that glanced her way could see the direction in which her eyes were glancing. And when she would raise up and become skinless and full of this pain, she would know what she meant to feel. And he, if she had stopped wandering long enough to be found, would have noticed. And he would feel. And it would be sickening.

River's worries were greater. They were vast and silken soft like bent corners of a universe  too tired to continue expanding. She had dog-eared her own pages out of lazy abandon and then wondered why the night sky had fallen black with neglect. She was meant for worship -- she was meant for cold so hard-pressed and chilled that opening her mouth would release a wind-storm filled with ice and shards so thick they would penetrate that in its way.

Subzero surrounded, and she would know it better because fire had been obvious and fire had been ineffective and fire had been weak. She knew this. This had followed her from the age of nine onward and she had known. Fire -- like that burning upon her skin that she scrubbed and blistered and burst to animate and take back as her on -- had been cited blank and hollow and emotion-filled like this girl had never intended to be. Backs of knees pushed in to fold over and fall: a weak spot that a god had missed when creating.

"Your god is too small," words whispered and hardly audible beneath her breath, clutching that shard of glass in her hand until it dribbled with pale red. Something diluted. Something not filled high enough with oxygen so her stars did not burn bright and did not fill her blood hued bright or deep. Just red. 

Just weakness from a painter of sky and a god surrounded by brush. Stuck on a rock. Contented with physicality just to remember that her scars could be freshened at the thought of this. She did not mean to feel frustration at the words she felt press against her skin and nudge her eyes any way but up. She did not mean to feel anything.

But she felt.

A deep inhale, and her lungs fill with ash. The cigarette feels misplaced in her hands, delicate as they are, holding it in acquainted yet fresh caution. Natalie has smoked before, once or twice in nights not unlike these, with the hooting laughter of teenagers in the background. She’d never made a habit of it, too committed to her supposed future in sports. But that future seems to be as scattered as the stars above her, so Natalie figures it can’t do her much harm.

It was a broken toast to a time far gone, she had decided upon that the minute the drunken stranger tucked away in the corner behind Catch had pressed it into her palm, his hands surprisingly warm against her own. He had muttered something about smuggling it from the trade center—about her needing it more than he did, though his words had been ladled with the sweet promise of alcohol, and she doubted he realized how true his words may really be. And so she’d inhaled and exhaled tendril after tendril as some broken goodbye to a long gone past, a tying knot to the memories from a time she could neither dedicate herself to nor hold on to anymore. Shouldn’t hold onto anymore.

And she had assumed she’d been alone in her venturing to the fields tonight, though the whispered words inform her otherwise. Natalie turned her head to glance towards the sound, barely catching the glint of some sort of metal to draw her attention. Her elbows dug into the ground as Natalie props up, folding her arms around her knees as her gaze squints in search of the source. A woman spotted, poised with arm on arm, though in the process of what, Natalie wasn’t sure.

This girl wanted to be sorry but could find it within her to remember the word for what it was -- what it tasted like on the edge of her lips before taking the plunge. She had said it too many times when she thought it would have meaning. Then boy in the chapel, his morose confusion and her unsteady stacked guilt that pushed the words out like they had known their own purpose before she did. That unwilling kindness she had explored, briefly, before bottoming out and sinking acid-ridden into the pit of her stomach to ache.

It tasted and it lingered along her taste to ask what it was hints of, but River only ever felt slick with the shiny slick of old coins in her mouth living atop a language of scars. She'd hardly know them now. And rolling around names was never meant to edge into eternity the way each and every lemongrass flavor had insinuated it would. Names like Jade. Blood Oranges like Lake. Licorice like Oz.

She only squeezed the glass shard in her hand to feel something, and when the red slid across it and down to the ground, it dizzied out the first hello. It meant nothing. Was not from the right source, the right galaxy. Could not sustain this hungry sky for the stars she had forgotten to feed. Only served to wake her against the sleep she ached behind her eyes for. 

This canvas asked for hue that served milking driblets from the scars on her legs she had not opened in so much time. She wanted to empty out sludge. She wanted to paint it brilliant nebulae onto this ungrateful sky. She had tried too hard last time. Sent too much. She wanted to make it right.

But the real girl dizzied herself weak and when her name comes, she recognizes it from the tongue of a name she remembered in vague, flashing moments. Rolling it on her tongue. Sea salt and berry wine. An acquaintance. A Natalie.