Half Light
Petals drifted slowly downwards as spirals of pale tears in the soft blue light. They carpeted the floor, catching like raindrops in her loose hair. She expired, breath brushing the petals gathered by her face.
She felt dizzy as if she’d been twirling around and around before falling from a great height. Memory served no purpose.
Eyelashes embraced with a careless blink. She watched more pink slivers flutter to the silvery ground from the cherry tree shading her fragile body. The tree felt familiar in some way, but she couldn’t understand why. It was like grasping at something that only appeared in the half light.
Her hand moved to her chest, settling above the place where her heart lay. There was something missing that she couldn’t place.
It was lost.
She only knew that it was lost and that part of her was gone. Someone had cut it away. Her sense of self, her certainties, her pride, her knowledge, her hope, her love…
It was all lost.
Water collected on her lips, salty and hot. She smeared the liquid away with her hands, realising that it was falling from her eyes. It was as if her body remembered what her soul could not. The chunk that had been erased was there, creeping somewhere in the tiniest parts of her, wishing with all its might that she might remember.
Her fingertips brushed through the soft, silvery feathers protruding from the ground. They laced her fingertips with moist pearls. Touch told her that it knew this sensation, that it had felt it before and that she had remembered it before.
But now it was gone.
More heat… More hurt… More pain… clouded her eyes and stole across her half lit cheeks. Her hand moved over her still chest, searching for something that was supposed to be doing something there. She just couldn’t remember what it was.
There was something… It was a murmur. She was supposed to feel a murmur…
Why would she feel a murmur?
She pushed against the soft soil until she was kneeling, gazing out at her surroundings. Darkness stretched away from her as far as the eye could see. The gentle glow of light emanated from somewhere above the cherry tree, but its source was obscured to her fresh eyes.
An image of the tree in light and glory flickered then faded. She remembered lips. There was something to do with lips.
An ache stirred in her chest. Tears trembled down her face, hot and unexplained. She brushed them away, reaching out to touch the bark of the tree, wondering at its rough and smooth.
Why couldn’t she grasp it? There was a void in her head, smattered with the remnants of a something. What was the something?
She ran a hand over the feathered wings that clung at her shoulders, feeling the sensation as if it was the first time. Was it the first time? Was any of this the first time that she had felt it?
Hot tears choked up her throat, bringing her sobbing to her knees. There was a memory of a something… a something like a kiss…
If only she could grasp it in the half light…
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