do not use your warm hands as weapons against us. do not undo the barriers, the time, the wounds, the winding,

just to let us ticker off the table- a fool of a toy. we are not designed for you, for him, for any one way of course except truth.

we do not care about your shame, your conflict avoidance, your fear of consequence has no use here. muddles the communication, the reconciliation, the possibilities that can only be endless in transparency

honest(l)y- how beautiful even the ugly is.

balance the scales, or leave.

Elias wiped damp hands on his pants. They were always wet as he was always nervous. The white of the cupboards gave the canary inside him some peace.

He had chosen Tiara.

Jasmine tucked auburn hair behind her ear. She tilted her head to the side and while her eyes intensely bore into him he could tell her mind was elsewhere.

“Ok.”

Was there pain? A little maybe? I mean none? Couldn’t be. Why even ask if you’re not going to feel it in the end? What was there to begin with?

“Oh.”

“I have to eat it. It’s not my choice. So Ok.”

Better. Yet still it stung a be to hear that’s all that love was in essence when speaking of him. Just Ok. The canary has begun to beat against its cage. It felt small, it felt as though it could see the oxygen leaving its small lungs but not to return. Harder. But then the white cupboards. White was ok.

So maybe ok wasn’t that bad after all.

———- [[imagine the universe really did want to experience itself? imagine you are the NPC and the MC. Elias starts and faeth ends, but which lived? who was observing whom?]]

***

holding cups of remembering, small sips of greedy memory mixing like paints on a pallet- your face the gulping and then the crying

and those tears they’re the forgetting.

I was ready is the cursive your lips never wrote in a language you knew but the world couldn’t read. I studied that language, lost in limbs and found in sighs.

I knew. and we slept in cold earth with comforter bodies in those shadows- we knew. my favorite sec(re)t, tucked (ligi)on your face

maybe still.

The world was beginning to flood. Little One, for reasons unnatural to those below and violent, it seemed, on their behalf, had begun to weep the day before. Tears the size of smaller worlds thrashing down upon them had even the General Shamans were thinking maybe they should have worn their highwaters rather than Sunday’s best.

“Little one?” a voice called

she didn’t know where she was: a knee, the crease of the arm, maybe even a collar bone. She had climbed for months to get there. Calling the entire time. A thought pushed her on- for beneath her sat an unexplained sea of salt that was surging, large enough and deep enough to demand the entire restarting of all of them. They couldn’t swim such depth or murk and the creatures that could were hungry were happy enough to welcome them.

“Little one?” Again the voice of warmth rang out and for whatever reason, in that moment the raining had stopped.

“Little one, why?” Equal parts confusion and concerned pleaded to the face unseen. a large, low wind suddenly blew across the planet. Moans that held tone but no clarity, just bass, caused waves. So the warm voice tried again, barely holding on.

“I am here, I am here, I am here and I want to know.”

Then came a rumbling unlike anything. The Little One’s quake shook the sharks awake and shook the wood of boats built in anger against the violence those Others perceived to be upon them. Some Wrathful God, maybe even their Wrathful God- so Others knelt down to pray.

The little one slowly Shrunk. (Ask Alice, she will tell you- Impossible things can happen this way.) While still larger than the rising sea but small enough to not be mistaken for Hurricanes and Tsunamis, the Little one settled and searched for the warm calling.

“Mother? Father? are you home, are you here?”

The booms were loud like fireworks.

“I did not mean for this to be this way. I loved the streets my feet could fit on, I loved the smells of warm bread and the voices of Other. But one day I began to fill up, and I filled and I filled and Suddenly I had filled so much that I started to cry. I had tried anger, I had tried grief but ultimately what I had needed was to pour. And look at what I’ve done! Even this is wrong.”

The rain began again.

“Little one!” the meek voice pleaded. “What have you done besides become more visible? All light demands to be seen on some scale.”

and the rain stopped again.