Chapter Text
In the distance, I smell lightning.
I’ve always been good at predicting where the first flash will land; where the sky will rend the world asunder, reaching out for the greatest and loneliest peaks. I smell it now, in the heat of summer, in the salt that drips down my neck and my stomach. I feel it rumble in my gut, in the distance, where a spectacle of heat and sound and light falls like a blade mid-shatter.
It streaks across the rain, not far beyond the waters where our ancestors felt the ocean in their blood and tried to reclaim it as their own.
For a fleeting moment, the world hangs in utter stillness, and the rain changes direction: they see the inferno of the earth and the trees, how laughably flammable this place we call home is, and they wonder if they’re better off above us and not among us.
If they’re so desperate to see the beings that make home in heart and shed blood to reclaim memories of lotus flowers, midsummer melon, kites warm with sun-bathed violet, and jealousy born from love, from family, from hatred, perhaps they should wait for us above.
If any of us are worth it, the lightning will strike at our outstretched fingers and make us smell sweet with ozone and ash, and it will whisper, come home to where you belong.
But then the light fades from the back of my eyes, and the blade breaks, and the rain falls. It’s the quiet hissing of sand poured over itself in an hourglass, the pitter-patter of storms that pound at your door and beg for release, the messy and tangible knots of dreams that end because you tell them to stop holding their breath.
The next time we should meet, I pray that it will be with bellies full with satisfaction and arms warm from touching shoulders with brothers we never met.
If the rain should fall so deeply and sink beneath the soft earth into darker places, I wonder if two people can live the same humid summer day a life and a half apart.