inkskinned:
it’s just - the way you were, the way that you got, back then. the bad rush, the oil spill so high up your neck that your teeth swam in it. what you needed back then was a barn raising. what you needed back then was all-hands-on-deck.
it’s just - you needed a village, is all. you needed your parents to actually just cool it for a second, because for one minute if you were very still, in the middle of the act of being roadkill: you could feel it. the edges of that sharp thing, the other-world, the promised land, the bird that was supposed to be born in your throat.
if you’d just - if any one person had just - noticed. maybe that would have been enough. you could have convinced your body to do a strange form of necromancy: you could have come back with the rope ladder. you were an emergency flare. you were morse code.
it’s okay. come home again. us do-it-yourself undead, those of us who broke the book and still found our way out of the grave again. we never got the return flight. we never got the party. we just got up. we got up and then we kept going, because nobody else was gonna clean the mess. we might as well. we just… exist here, half-ghosts, barely-made it kids. no medals, except the strange serene rush of spreading jam on perfect toast. of moving a paintbrush. the silence that knows about the danger of sparks. the little candle of our heart not a stormbreaker or earthshaker. just the persistent lick of hope.
it is a quiet reward. we will not get the barn, but we do get each other. a night sky of little lights made from the gruesome survival of blood and bone. the life we made in the dark. a little somber radiance. a spellwork that’s all our own.
in the end - despite it all, we built ourselves a home.
