Daughter of the Sky
By Victoria G.
Minako hums quietly because it soothes her, the vibration of her own voice. She hums as she traces Rei's arm, never loud enough to wake the other girl and never an entire song. The Miko sleeps as if she has not slept in years each time they are together. She sleeps as if she is sick, as if her body demands it and will not hear otherwise. Minako does not mind because she enjoys watching her sleep, enjoys the surrender of it. Her own body makes no such demands. She often wonders if she did not sleep enough to last her entire life when she was younger. She remembers a story from when she was a child of a woman who slept for years so she could stay awake for the rest of her life. As she watches, enamored with elbows and eyelids and still lips… she is that woman. It's become a ritual between them, for Minako to watch her lover as she waits for soon forgotten dreams to overtake her.
Minako likes the word "lover", likes the way it feels to think it, but says it only when she is alone, lost in her thoughts and in an unconscious whisper. It seems like scandal, like intrigue to call it that… much more than simply thinking of this as a relationship. Either would be true, but she makes a choice. When their lips touch, when Rei looks at her the way that she does, Minako finds that it rings truer. The word better describes proximity induced weakness, the way air can turn to water, the pounding heartbeat in fingertips and toes and everywhere between. There is a beyond… a more buried in the term that she is taken with.
Minako watches the movement of bone beneath flesh…muscles, tendons, ligaments all working to bring an elegant hand beneath a pale cheek. It seems like magic to her when she thinks of it that way. Minako likes when simple things require so many tiny steps that the fact that these things occur at all is in itself remarkable. She likes when a leaf takes forever to fall, likes that there is never a fight between the breeze and the leaf, just a drawn-out dance as if it were planned the whole time. She likes that about the girl lying beside her, she moves always as if there is no other path... like she was destined to scratch her nose or pick up a pencil. Even beyond the truth of who they are, Minako catches herself thinking that the Miko is something more than human, perhaps a daughter of the sky fallen to earth. She believes because, at times when she sees Rei, she is the sun, too bright, too beautiful, too far away and other times she is the air surrounding her completely, in her and of her.
Minako thinks only of these things when she should be sleeping... when the darkness and shadows make it safe to let her mind wander. She thinks in metaphors and hyperbole, in things that would die in the harsh fluorescent light. She thinks of ways to capture the emotional subtleties of needing another person, of beauty that pains the heart, or caresses that burn. She tries to find the words to pin down experiences so impactful and unique they demand to be shared and locked away all at once. In those moments, the intensity of it all seizes her heart, grips it and steals the breath from her lungs. Minako smiles. She touches the face that now seems to glow as if the silvery moon were trapped beneath her skin. She is the earth spinning, cast half in shadow and they are in love.
End.