my angel, ∞
her smiles are worn. years of loss and sunsets have left her wondering why she was fated to this life. she doesn’t know if she can call it life any longer. she doesn’t consider herself alive. she has lived far too long to find the sunrises any more beautiful than the sunsets. she imagines the sunsets and sunrises and the skies away and is left with the golden world that is her only companion.
she moves. she walks and talks. she breathes out of habit and eats on occasion. she knocks herself on the doorframe when she passes into rooms hoping that one day she’ll acquire a bruise. it seems so long since she last acquired anything of worth.
she watches the world beneath her crumble into waste. junkyards begin holding sentimental possessions; trash bins hold past memories. the people she once was run out of space on the world they live in. she finds the tears in her eyes only after they begin rolling down her cheeks in small, personal waterfalls. it’s not surprising that she didn’t feel them prickle when they first appeared. she hasn’t felt anything since she first arrived.
she watches her mother wither with age and concern. worry and regret never did do her mother well. she wonders how it feels to outlive a daughter. she guesses it’s something like losing her father before she could know him as a person, something other than just a parent. she watches her mother lean on a walking cane and visit her husband’s headstone every day for two weeks before sickness overcomes her. she wonders if she would have been supporting her mother instead of the cane had she been there for her.
her mother never does join her. she grits her teeth and bites the inside of her cheek. she can feel metallic liquid pooling into the sides of her mouth, but she can’t feel the pain. she closes her eyes and thinks about what her mother could have done to deserve this. she wonders what she, herself, did. she looks at the sun that blazes warmth that she no longer feels bathing her skin and asks why?.
she runs through fields of uncertainty and wonderings. she lives an existence of what if?s and could i have?s and should i have?s. she bites her lips and rips at the skin until her lips are a rose of bleeding red and the layers she has torn off are fallen petals. she wonders why she feels like a fallen angel if she has supposedly risen.
she sits on the edge of her consciousness, hiding in the depths of her mind. she has long forgotten the echoes of the pain that took her from the ones who loved her, who missed her, but the pain of watching them fall to pieces in old age is recurring, constant. less and less of the people she once was find their ways to her home. she sighs to herself and picks at the torn layers of her lips while she ponders the difference between a home and house and then decides that the existence that envelops her is nothing more than a house.
she wraps her arms around herself in a false sense of security and clenches her teeth together while she watches her brother’s last moments. he clasps his wiry fingers with that of his wife’s before breathing an i love you with his last ghosted exhale. she digs her fingernails into her palm until there are red-rimmed crescents marking her skin. she closes her eyes and counts to sixty and hopes that after a minute of waiting, the second it takes for a life to end will carry her brother to her.
her brother doesn’t make it to her, either. her breath hitches in her throat and she feels like something is caught in the back of her mouth. soon there are teardrops cascading past her cheeks and raining onto her knees, pulled up to her chest. the white gown she has long donned darkens with each splash of salty water, and she mourns the loss of another loved one she will never see again.
she has the face of a seventeen year old, still lost in an in-between of trying to find an identity in a world of billions and stubbornly knowing exactly what fate has written. she no longer carries her naïveté, her clueless ramblings about a world she did not understand. she glances at the still pond of clear water, frozen over in ice, and steels herself long enough to allow her eyes to meet her reflection’s. her eyes are deep burrows of years of solitude mingling with layers of pain. sometimes she forgets how old she is, how long she’s been aging in the shell of a seventeen year old, but her reflection is always quick to remind her.
she stops counting the passing of seasons after her brother’s departure. the autumn leaves blew melodies into the wind, and the wind carried the tunes into the winter, where the ragged branches whistled songs with every breath of frosty air. the spring brought dancing roses and petals that twirled in merry joy, and rain washed the performance away in spring’s final number. summer welcomed the psithurism of luscious leaves of trees that sprinkled the landscape, and the clouds rolled off the ends of the earth and disappeared into the horizon only to bring autumn once more. she realizes that the seasons themselves have become more animate than she is.
her fingers are clasped behind her head in a makeshift pillow and she drifts slowly through a perpetual light that surrounds her. the light seems so distant and yet so close, but she has never been able to touch the glowing world around her. she reckons it feels something like the softest silk, shimmering and fluid, but it seems so substantial and amaranth despite that. she realizes that even after hundreds of years she doesn’t even know where she is; even now, she’s just a lost seventeen year old girl looking for her place in the world.
reincarnation, she’s heard, is the only way to escape this solace, her prison. the familiar faces she’s passed in her years have all chosen to disappear. leaving was committing to a life of suffering, for that is what the people she once was do. life is pain with small pockets of happiness, and she isn’t sure she yearns for that anymore. she wanders for a few more years, swimming through an emptiness that allows her to feel nothing, before deciding that the absence of feeling is worse than the absence of happiness.
she spends the last moments before her departure crying. she cries into melting snow and budding tulips and clouds rolling off the horizon into a new land. she cries for the fleetingness of life, the weakness of stability, the fragility of happiness. the memories of her past life swirl through her mind like a haunting lullaby, but she smiles them into the laughter of her childhood. for the first time, she remembers her family without sadness, and she curls into their love and sleeps.
she is born as a baby girl, her tiny fists bundled to her chest by a blanket swaddling her body. there are hands brushing the wisps of her hair off her, and she feels the rough, calloused tips of fingers upon her forehead. she feels the slight twinges of pain as the air of the world fills her lungs for the first time. she is crying again, but the wails are that of the infant she now is, not the angel wizened beyond her seventeen years. the world of the people she once was has become the world of the people she now is, and she opens her eyes to the blaring of the white hospital room and bright lights. her father looks between her mother and her in his arms, and she realizes that the loss of someone is for the gain of another.
the memories of her past life slowly slip from her grasp. she waves them away with a smile on her face, and her rosy lips and white gown and tearful eyes greet her new family. her wings unfurl from her back and she flies into a new life. this, she knows, is home.
-1,391 words
seri ; 130217