ophelia young / d4 / (fin)

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

 

ophelia young

 if we never leave this town,
we might never make it out.

{ district four. seventeen. }

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

she'll tear a hole in you,
the one you can't repair

“Hey, mom,” she starts, with her head leaned against her mother’s; the coarse ends of her hair trickle Ophelia’s neck and she smells like the sea that they face towards, exotic and fresh. “When we put the sea-shells near our ears, what is the noise that we hear?” She feels her mother stir, gently, before craning her neck at young Ophelia, at her dark hair tied in a sloppy bun and at her face painted with freckles and at the peacemaker’s smile loose on her small mouth.

Her slender fingers tuck a stray strand of Ophelia’s hair back into place as she chuckles. “That’s the sea, my darling,” her voice is as clear as water, “singing its melody in your ear.”

“But,” Ophelia, perplexed, whirls around to stare at the shimmering blue ahead and sees that it doesn’t have a mouth where song could travel out of. “The sea doesn’t have a mouth or a tongue to sing tunes.” Her mother laughs at that; she has the sort of laughter that stretches on for miles like the azure sky overhead. “It doesn’t need one, dear,” She says, as a matter-of-factly. “Songs come from within you, they come from,” her hand rises and falls on where Ophelia’s heart sleeps quietly, “here.”

She smiles, brighter this time, coiling her little arms around her mother. “I trust you, mommy,” she says.

Ophelia, on that summer-bright day on the beach, amongst the cool tides and the hot draughts of air, leaves her logic and sense of realism stranded. When she returns home with her mother after they’d bought herbs and potatoes for dinner, she wonders if vegetables have a song within them too. That’s how the poet inside Ophelia was born – through a sensible query, and through an impractical answer. Soon, she starts looking for songs and melodies in everything – in the innards of her painted-on socks, in the dishwasher, in the bucket of water with the moon reflected on its surface, and in herself.

She is eight on that day at the beach, moving her hands in accordance with the tides’ advancement and withdrawal, her teeth red from chewing on the strawberries her mother packed. Even though she is fifteen now , she remembers the salt wind on her cheeks, the sweet taste on her tongue.

Another phenomenon that Ophelia owns, aside from her herself, is her ability to remember. Her head is a library and she knows each section and the books stock in it, knows the feel of each book’s spine, knows how thick and thin, knows what its exact genre is. She is the librarian of her own mind. “It’s called photographic memory,” Her mother says when asked, after laughing the same laughter from before, “every girl in our family has it because we are supposed to be young forever – that includes our minds.”

Ophelia muses about about her mother's words in the bath-tub that night, amidst warm waters and the shrunken lilies she’s decided to bath with before throwing them away. The air is scented like spring from the dead lilies and she smiles at the fact that death cannot take entire parts of a thing, only some. The enamel claw of the tub has been rusting for long and whenever she stirs in the water, it would creak. She uses its metallic song to lure herself into a buoyant sleep. When Ophelia awakens, with her dark hair spread out in the water like jellyfish tendrils, the water is cold and she is shivering.

     There’s another song in the clatter of her teeth. 

Sometimes, the memories are glorious and deserving of its immortality, such as the memory in which she is fourteen and her father, with his khaki pants and sleeveless shirt, teaches her how to tie knots. She could recall each and every thing she was schooled on, from the strong fisherman’s knot to the elegant bowline. Afterwards, her father brings some pieces of wood and with this newfound knowledge of hers, Ophelia makes her first ever toy boat. It drifts towards the tides and the white, sea broth before disappearing beneath a tall wave.

This memory proved that some memories deserved to be remembered. But, there are also hideous memories that she wishes she could pluck out, gingerly, from the walls of her head like broken glass shards.

     In one of these dreadful memories,
     Ophelia is sixteen & deeply in love.

Her dress is sheer and diaphanous, dancing in the hot summer wind that rushes forward to bring bloom to flowers, and there’s a large sun hat draped lowly over her head that draws whimsical shadows on Ophelia’s face.

It’s April, she remembers, when buds unfurl and as do thunder clouds. But, the distant horizon shows no storms, only an endless blue that makes Ophelia dizzy if she stares at it for long. Clutched in her arms, is a colorful basket of summer fruits – mangoes juicy and ripe, strawberries as red as fire, and plump grapes. Then, before she could reach for a grape, he comes in the periphery of her vision and then, in a sudden, he is her vision. She remembers his beauty, unmatched by no one. He has a mouth that promises softness and a jaw as sharp as glass. His blue eyes are the shimmering blue she could see if she tries between the intervals of the district’s low houses, and she could swim in them for all of eternity.

Ophelia loves seeing the gleam in his eyes whenever they lock with her own. “Hey,” she greets him in the same time he says, “Run away with me.”

The question would haunt Ophelia on her later nights, when she is alone and has nothing to dance with but her own thoughts. She refuses him, of course, and watches the flap of his collar trembling in the wind as he bikes away from her. On her way back to her house, the april winds suddenly pick up and carry her sun hat off a cliff, a faint drizzle morphs into torrents of rain. She feels pieces of her heart harden like the mud on the road after the rainstorm.

Now, she is seventeen and laying on her bed in a black dress, its ends frayed beautifully, as her thoughts swirl like galaxies in her head. She wonders why she didn’t run away, why she didn’t leave this room of hers or her parents. And, if they do run away, where would they run to? Four, though it has the sea, is fenced as much as the other districts.

Lonely islands maybe, she muses, far and far away from land.

She would see a few of them whenever she takes her daily walks down the beach – islands, stranded and quiet, a speck in the blue horizon. Perhaps she refused because she is content with the life she has. It is a glacial life, full of picking strawberries from the market at dawn and helping her father with his knots and boat till noon, but it holds no danger, no extreme poverty. She could survive in it, but is survival truly the same as living, she wonders even more.

Perhaps she refused because there is a price she’s paid for this memories of her, a grave price that only Ophelia and her parents know about.

Though she could recall each past day, splice it into segments and recite each statement she’s heard from the radio, Ophelia could not remember names. Whenever someone introduces themselves to her, a part of her brain skips over their name whilst processing the other details, and she has to shyly refer to them by silly nicknames she’d make up on the spot. Human names, to Ophelia Young, are nothing but mere radio static.

     Perhaps she refused because she would never learn his.

lyrics: stubborn love - lumineers

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

based off of the lumineers' entire cleopatra album
(i think?? idk)
and she's done and i love her so much

[Deleted]

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