tj kingswell /1

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

thalia-josephine 'TJ' / sixteen / second eldest / botany / vvitch / colt

"I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul."
- pablo neruda

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

t j .

"I woke up from a dream last night
Where all the skies were green
You were the Sun
Down on the wave came your daylight"

Colt is a liar.

They all are with their oh so big hearts and sunshine smiles crafted specifically to hide any shadow. TJ looks at them and sees right through them, clear as glass. No matter how happy her family claims to be, she still sees the marks of sadness on all of them, which is fine and just. Life does that in a sloppy, beautiful kind of way like lightning strikes across the skin, everyone is a little sad.

It's just mental cellulite.

She bares hers proudly, a net of starlight wrapped so tightly over her eyes that it's hard to see. Maybe it's because it's laced so exquisitely over her skin but there is a partition between her and the rest, invisible but there. She feels it climb higher every now and then, an impenetrable thing that seems impossible to breakthrough.

Her mom says that it's just part of being a teenager but TJ isn't so sure, it doesn't feel that way. Sometimes she feels so numb but then other times so intensely that it's hard to breathe.

She spends a lot of time alone in the woods behind the house.

As the second eldest, life is kind of strange. Colt has his thing as eldest sibling. He's the caretaker, the prince of their little secluded kingdom and she's just, well, something else entirely. She's not quite sure yet, she doesn't know what she wants to be.

Her mothers forbade career training, even homeschooled them for a long time. That was fine, forbidden things like Aristotle and Sylvia Plath litter her mind. Schooners sail across her imagination and she was twelve when she started building her treehouse deep in the forest.

No one had ever told her that she couldn't build a home so she didn't know not to try.

Tj finds animal bones on the forest floors and scrubs them clean, wrapping them with bits of ivy, feather and twine to create works of art. She gifts them to her siblings freely and they call them talismans. "For protection," she says and drapes a circlet of wolf fangs around Colt's neck.

The rafters of her tree house always have drying herbs hanging from them, she started foraging when she was young. She learned the plants and uses from Harriet, an old woman that has lived a mile down the road since as long as TJ can remember. She makes balms and tinctures using the old ways that Harriet teaches her. Sometimes when Colt is looking sore she places a tea brewed from solomon's seal and teasel down in front of him.

Her siblings call her remedies witch brews but she doesn't mind. It's alright to be a little different, comforting almost.

Lotus asks her for stories often and she weaves pretty little ones for her younger siblings around the warmth of the hearth before bed. Her hands make shadow puppets from the light of the fire and for an hour or so, she has their complete attention. At home, TJ is a queen, a fantasy creature that walks through dreams and watches over her siblings.

In the city, she is a speck of dust on an immaculate surface, she sticks out like a sore thumb in their new high school. They all sort of do, having been homeschooled and raised on the outskirts of the district, their priorities differ slightly than those of their classmates.

They call her a cryptid, a witch, they leave rude messages on her locker. She pretends not to hear them when they whisper about how she'll put a curse on them because she's never really been one for confrontation. Her younger siblings hold her hands on the way to and from school, endless chatter falling from their mouths and it's the best parts of her day.

In class, TJ sits at a desk by the window and gazes out at busy streets, at buildings that rise up towards the sky and dreams of her forest.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

gamemaker artemie 🦉nyte uwu

[gamemaker artemie 🦉nyte]

can u please stop hurting me when i give u nice things

accepted~