The Return

All my friends are heathens, take it slow

Wait for them to as you who you know

Please don't make any sudden moves

You don't know the half of the abuse

I.

At first, her journey had been a hopeful one.

After an eternity of nothingness and confinement, it was enough of a relief to merely move again, touch again, see again, to feel her hair brush against her face and neck as it floated in the weightlessness of space.

For so long, there had been nothing but nothingness interspersed with short blips of painfully limited contact to the outside world, just a few words or images dumped into the void that had trapped her, to be retrieved later, none of which held any meaning to her.

Throughout all of this, she'd had no face with which to grimace, no hands with which to fend for herself, and no voice with which to scream, her existence so inconsequential as to be easily forgotten, but undeniable to herself if only for the terror, rage and indignity that required for someone to exist feel them; And so she'd clung to them, as her one and only tether to reality, more than anything else, more than any memories of her distant past, any long faded individuals she might have known, or any supposed purpose she might once have had.

And the worst of her fears had been that eventually, even that would fade with time, leaving her a shell that had long since forgotten to be alive, with no means to distinguish herself from the emptiness coming from where her senses should have been;

Pain, she'd decided, was still vastly preferable to nothingness, and if she had to be stuck with one of them, then she would drink that bitter cup with her own hands, lest she forget:

Her name was Lapis Lazuli, and she was not a thing.

In the darkness, the slick and bitter wrath had been the only thing to nourish her soul, and she'd held on to it as if for dear life, held on to the hot and heavy pain even as she had no hope of release, and no eyes from which to let its searing pressure pour out.

Now, as the wide expanse of the universe lay before her, she could not believe the lightness that she felt, paradoxically, from the experience of once again taking up space and projecting out mass; Out here, there was no gravitational field strong enough to pull her down, but she did grow aware of the pull of her own inertia as she accelerated.

Even the very ability to turn her field of vision however she pleased and to decide the angle at which the she looked upon the world felt like an almost surreal level of freedom, and at first, with relief and gratitude still swelling in her chest, she'd turned and twirled in serpentine lines, somersaulting in the void as she sped forward, spreading her arms almost as wide as her wings as her eyes took in the starlight;

It was not just her spirit that felt revitalized, either, and eventually, she would come to consider that the only explanation for how she'd allowed herself such an illusion: For so, so long, she'd experienced the world through a filter of dimness and static, held down not only by her physical prison, but the nasty crack that had limited her already meager means of getting out; She'd had a long, long time to contemplate just how close she had come to being shattered altogether, and far too much to not at least consider that that may in fact have been the more merciful fate;

For a moment, she'd even thought that it would end up sealing her fate after all, even after she'd managed to escape the mirror, that moment in which she'd realized that the state she'd been in might prevent her from making it off planet after all.

But now, everything was crisp and clear again, every motion feeling vivid and real; here she was, among black holes and galaxies, taking in the lights of stars and nebulas, far beyond that unreachable piece of sky that had taunted her for so long, and just for a moment, she had dared to believe, and to hope that maybe, she'd been allowed some respite.

The further she came, the more the Earth faded into the lines of the milky way, a pale blue dot glittering among many distant colored blotches, her torments floating far behind her, until she couldn't even say with certainty which one it was, or if it was even still visible at all; Before long, she'd have left its entire Galaxy behind her, and, at the time, she was sure that she was never going back.

So when she reached the ends of the colossal spiral, she couldn't wait to slip from the binds of its gravity, to float past the last of its silvery stars, through its murky halo of burnt-out dust and dark matter, some of it once part of some long disintegrated stars, some left over from the flaming birth of the universe itself, this world so boundless that it had remained undisturbed ever since, until a passing blue gem grazed them with her watery wings; Her first emotion upon piercing the darkness of the intergalactic medium had been relief, her hardened heart too cautious to treat itself to joy, but, at least, she felt one step closer to being able to wash off the taint of those days, and wore a hesitant smile as the milky way began to shrink to a distinct mass of stars behind her;

It's yellowish, central bar and the long silvery spiral arms could have been considered a thing of beauty, but as far as Lapis was concerned, she was just glad to be rid of it, more than ever now that she could see it as a distinct, single entity, a discreet thing other than just stars, planets and nebulas as they could be found anywhere in the universe.

When she regarded it like this, its form was easy to imbue with disdain, and so she made a deliberate point to to take one last, firm look at it, before turning away decisively, vowing to forget that place and that place's woe.