The Journey-Work of Stars
abstraction
(I don't own the BBC)
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She feels like an unknown dirge, a multipart symphony in patience and distance unbroken by the clawing sensation of unjustness which calmly and constantly exists in her throat. When she speaks, her voice-box holds an ancient emptiness, and her whispers are heavy with the absence of action. (Her eyelashes ache for the brush of his cheek, her fingers longing and straining as air slips through, a stream of nothing swirling in the spirals of fingerprints.)
Her lungs hurt if she thinks about him too much.
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Sometimes she will pause in the afternoons, sunlight breaking against her skin through the large, large, impossibly large glass doors and she will feel her cells soaking up the warmth, and she will pretend that he is just around the corner outside, bristling with the need to leave soon. In her mind, he will walk, bemused, right up to the other side of the glass doors and arch an eyebrow, waiting for her eyes to open. A shadow will pass over her face and for that dark moment behind her eyelids, her heart will swell and flutter with maybemaybemaybe--- but when she looks the window is clear and shining, and the shadow will only be a cloud lazily hiding the sun as it passes. She turns away.
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There are some moments she enjoys here, small pieces of complete comfort taking hold of her heart for the briefest of seconds. Sometimes it will be the familiar ritual of making tea in the early morning, before even the sun glows behind the horizon, and when the kettle sings she will somehow know in the deep of her bones that this is okay, that she is normal, that somewhere, somewhen, someone has been through this before. She will think, warmly, that she belongs to this anonymous collective of time survivors and this overwhelming strength of not being alone will stay in her blood before dwindling, slowly, when the first rays of morning brush her face.
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She lives quietly when she is alone; absorbing Tennyson through her pores, working through Kafka in German when she wants a challenge. She likes the feel of her insides adjusting, as if she is soothing those vibrating nerves which ache for the breath of uncertainty, the action of deconstruction. She has learned to treasure the calm before the storm, and when she is working, fighting, surviving through the threats and invasions and hostility of the other worlds out there, she no longer thinks of what he would do, only instinctually knows what she should do.
Yesterday, she talked about Dickens to a visiting race from Trin, gaseous blue and enormously amiable. A year from now she will laugh genuinely about a blue box to the Akr, who give earth the gift of crystallized splinters of their home sky. Not all of it is terrible, she will think, and the next day they will try to take her with them.
She hesitates before declining.
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Sometimes, right at the edge of nightfall, she will lay against the sweeping green fields of her home, and watch the stars gradually appear, pressing into the memories of long ago. The vaulted dark will melt into a midnight so bright that her breath will catch before releasing to mix with other atoms, a nocturne of molecules silently composing themselves for the sky.
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Nights melt into days, melt into years, and the decades of her life are shown only through the endless depths of her eyes, gold shining in the rim of her irises when the light hits it in the late afternoon sun. Her hair stays fair and glows lightly in the dim illumination of her room. Her skin remains smooth, unblemished. They never talk about it.
When they are all shells of the earth, solemnly buried under rich soil, she doesn't despair, or feel resignation for their loving hearts being shut away. She only knows its time for her to find a way back to him. To herself.