memories to taunt | cynthia/sage

[я𝑜𝓈𝑒]

[presto]

CYNTHIA S U M M I T

[/presto]

{ we make our agreements about when to meet
and i'll leave you in the doorway
the cold evening aches as it leaves in its wake
oh the memories left by the day ;

Swords.

Swords had torn into the little girl's delicate skin. Their blades had danced across her flesh without even a footnote of mercy or an attempt to masquerade benevolence, and left in the wake of their frolic a rain of her blood. Entangled in the wicked arms of a forest of thorns, screams escaped from her throat, closing in tears.

Pain must have spiraled through every nerve in her body from the onslaught of thorns tearing into her flesh. All roses have thorns, but her child eyes were blindsided by the pink of the petals.

And she called her mother's rose garden a monster, but I shook my head against her words, broken by tears, and assured her that monsters roamed elsewhere and gardens were not their domain. She cried out in fear of the onslaught of agony, and I shielded her with my arms and promised her it would recede in time.

She asked me, as I laid bandages upon her wounds, if I too was afraid of pain. Head steady in neither a nod or a shake, I said after a sudden silence, "Not anymore, not anymore; pain is not to be feared."

[Jack once asked me, same as the girl, if I was afraid of pain.
And I said, "Not anymore, not anymore."
Jack once asked me if I relished the agony.
And I said, "No, that is not the word I would use."

She replied, "Then why do you remember her?"

(And you don't, Jack?

You don't remember the sea on the screen?
You have forgotten the valleys of crimson,
sprawling across her skin?
You have left behind her name,
called out from a slip of paper as a demand?
How could you have forgotten, Jack,
when it is all scored into my mind?)

My words oozed from my lips in ebony - and there is nothing, no amount of spills of I'm sorry's, to scrub away the filth of the aftermath.

"I remember my sister because my mind is not a sieve and my heart has the capacity to feel grief. She deserves to be remembered. She deserves the honor of having a gravestone to forever stand against the passing centuries. If we forget her, she died in vain.

I will not allow her to have died in vain.

Living hurts, living is pain, but I have become numb to the horror and pain has become a companion. I love living; perhaps I do relish the agony, after all.

At least I can feel anything at all, Jack.
At least my eyes are not hollow voids drilled into my skull.

I am afraid you do not have that luxury."

I did not apologize; I was not sorry.

Perhaps Sylvia, mother dearest, was right after all: I am a wretched girl with poison riddled teeth.

(And mother dearest Sylvia once told me, sitting upon her throne at the dinner table, "Grief turns the kindest souls
into monsters, Cynthia."
Her words hold true to me -
disgust wells up in the back of my throat.)

I have only ever unraveled bandages and blanketed miles of them across raw, red flesh - this bitter taste of blood is alien on my tongue. But my body does not welcome it into my system and it is banished, the heavy sentence of outcast hanging over it like a shadow.

(I am supposed to fix the world, not throw knives
from the tip of my tongue and curse flesh with scars.)

Jack does feel, despite her cold distance and curious bloodlust; I had seen the cracks creep across her glass eyes she insists are stone. And I - I unsheathed a dagger and sliced into the surface of the skin beyond her armor.
I awaited the arrival of the guilt, but my guest had canceled.

(There is no guilt, no shame, in honoring one's sister.)

Jack once told me, "It's been a year since she died, Cyn. You need to move on."
And I hissed in retort, "She'll come back, Jacqueline. I know she will."]

The little girl asked me why - why I did not tremble against the darkness of pain, why through my distorted eyes, it was not a monster.

"Do you love life?" I inquired in return.

She nodded.

"Then in time, you will learn as I have that pain is merely a companion."

And she left, hand linked with her mother's.

I saw myself in the mirrors of her sapphire eyes, the little girl ravaged by a thicket of roses. Stella was is my rose thicket, my cage of agony. Her face is scratched into the backs of my eyes, her faded breath is tearing through my flesh, and the silence of her voice is eating its way through my insides like ruthless acid.

One year and two days.

It is not enough time to pull away the shroud of shadows. It is not enough time for the anguish to ebb away into the veils of descending sunlight, for the sun does not dare shine upon the Summit house.

She'll come back. I hear my promise singing through the sirens of the bells, clinking together to signal to arrival of a new customer.

All I see is her face, and I would swear it was the face of a ghost if I did not know any better. Whispers circulating throughout the Summit house of her return had kindled the precious light of hope in my heart, from which was born a promise to myself: She'll come back.

The girl who walks through the door and right into my heart is Stella Summit.

{ oh and questioning why as you look to the sky
that is cloudless up above our heads
and thoughts come to mind about our short little lives
haven't left the path that they will tread ;

. . .

table: fox.
lyrics: "haunt" by bastille.