Nights like this I wandered aimlessly. My mind would wonder with my tired legs as I ended up on my usual perch.
I felt strange. Neither good nor bad came to be, or cross any other threshold . I just was as I always was.
I was in between. There was a steadfast limbo that lead to another version of purgatory - one where my brain was trapped in an endless universe of possibilities.
The other was writing a negative story for me to follow, and I did quite often. I was expunged from history - his history precisely.
I was a fragment of what we'd looked for, and a memory blurred into a seamless film. I was no longer of importance, or seemingly belonged amongst the world that I wanted.
Whatever euphoria I felt in those years beneath the summer sun, or buried beneath the blanket of starlight, was a minuscule blip in my life.
On the surface, I was still normal. A more grown up version of the girl I saw in photographs and heard about in family stories.
I could have let myself go into the abyss and waited for that warmth to absorb me again, but I hesitated. That hesitation left me transfixed with no room for freedom.
I merely sat in silence. It was almost every night that I mused about the sweetest I felt beneath all the turmoil that became so present.
Each year, I felt the changes and felt the sea begin to split as I watched with heavy eyes as we grew. The wily boy I knew began his own ascent into adulthood with a tempest on his shoulder.
There would never be another like him.
We forcibly parted ways and lived out our separate lives as though we were ghosts, or imaginary beings. The past was what I wanted, but the bustling future called my name like a siren.
Reality split me in half, I suppose. Lingering touches still amplified my senses and my favorite times in those abandoned shelters and treacherous forests... They all reminded me that I was living in a dream.
It felt like a lifetime ago. It was several in the mundane timeline that was given by clocks and numbers. It didn't make the light years seem any greater or smaller, truly.
I let my fingers run the length of the old well house door as I listened to the streets begin to settle. I wondered if he waited for me, or would come find me one day.
I always did. Seeing that blur of red darting from my window would make my heartbreak a thousand times.
Imagining it did, too.
And, as every night, I steeled myself in resistance to those feelings. I was no longer a Lady, he no longer a Lord. Life's current was ever changing, and steered my ship in another direction.
My place was clearly written, and his was as alive and uncertain as it had always been. And as I walked beside my former shelter, I pressed a hand to the scarring and felt the notch where the arrow had been.
No matter what we always ended up somewhere in between. All the magic eventually fades, and we see ourselves for what we really are.
But in the end, we're all cursed with human hearts.
AN: I'm not dead! My life happened quite suddenly and it's not slowing down! Hope everyone has been well and I've missed you.