Work Text:
The first thing you see is a girl with your face, gazing at you. You know her, as she knows you. You know her because you have her body, because you breathe in it, you fill it, and sleep within it, like a blanket, every night.
You have stitched your body many times, tightly sealed with knots all around. Skin stuck, layers and layers of blood and veins, and among all of them, you are somewhere, drifting around in dim red. Always sleeping inside yourself, with nothing but your voice to fill the spaces you couldn’t tighten.
Inside the nerves and crannies of a body that was more like a house too big for yourself, you didn’t have anything to offer to anybody. This body of yours, something pulled over your head, ill-fitting and yet, you couldn’t leave it alone.
She arrived one day, melting off the snow, dawning upon the borders of your body. She has your eyes, and your nose. She has your lips and your smile and your frown. Your pout and your tears. Abigail, she says. Her voice is a quiver of light, something that aches inside you. She speaks and you answer, because, what else would you do?
What else would you do, then letting guide you to places unknown?
You read about fae when you were five,
And maybe it is not such a good idea to let her take you wherever she pleases,
But what else would you do, when her eyes are the frost, the fog that climbs into your head every night?
Abigail whispers to you about the deer she killed, two days ago. Her hands move, as if she practiced the way they would say in the air. And her mouth has only spoken conversations practiced to a mirror. Yet, she tells you about the blood. About wounding its legs.
She tells you about how it fell to her feet. That her birthday present was a hunting knife, gleaming within the deer’s eyes.
She says it had your eyes.
When the last knot comes undone, and your body unwraps from yourself, she becomes smoke to your eyes. When you find yourself alone, with moonlight on the side where she would rest her head, you wonder if she is asleep, alone. You wonder if you were to call her, she would know.
You wonder why, then, if she is gone, every corner and part of your body feels inside out, as if it has forgotten its own shape, and it needs fixing. Maybe it is because she is no longer there for you to see her, for you to mold into her shadow, or to her side.
Maybe she has taken everything you stole. Left to your own shapeless void of skin and blood. Left you without a face, a smile, a mouth. And maybe she left, because she is your Adam, and you were carved from her rib, sculped from her wintery eyes. From her frost and the warmth of her smile.
You search for her in your ribs. Your veins. The way your skin folds and stretches. In the way your fingers curl.
You look for Abigail, so maybe you are looking for yourself. In the way this man is crushing you, with pain blossoming in your torso. With the way his hand is on your neck, as he squeezes whatever is left you out into the air. Maybe you are the one who took it all, and that is why she vanished. And he is coming to put her together with the scraps you have, all your knots and seams and nooks and crannies.
You scratch your own palms and feel lines of blood. The burning of having no air left, reminding you of times you would submerge yourself in a river, until you couldn’t stay beneath it.
The strangled thread of little sounds comes out from your mouth. Like a wounded animal about to drop to the ground, looking for a place to die peacefully.
In his eyes, clouded with something delirious, like that foggy sensation Abigail would leave you in, there is Abigail, beneath the lake. With arms extended, head tilted, looking at you with her eyes. Your eyes.
In blue, she does not move. In blue, you feel her image ripple in waves. In blue, she wraps herself. And as you gaze upon her, with night rising, you cannot help but wonder how it would feel to kiss her, now as she is still beneath the waters.
You crash into her, as she disappears from the lake. You kissed your mirror, once, and now you wonder if this is the same. Pulling upon your strings, you wonder if this is how Narcissus felt, when he leaned down to kiss the beautiful man in the pond and found nothing within it. Not even himself.
She took you by the hand and led you to her father’s maw. She makes a home from behind her father’s fangs.
And you wished you could have told her, that maybe, you could have forgiven her,
If only she had been the one to drown you, instead.
So maybe it would have been like returning home,
or
Maybe just returning into your body, where you could fade away,
to the lull of her
to the place from where you were taken.