Chapter Text
I possess no voice with which to speak to you, no hands with which to write this letter, but even so.
Even so, I want you to know that not once have I forgotten.
I want you to know everything that remains written deep inside me, all the traces you have left there, all the change you had sown within me, small and twittering like a newborn chick, but unwavering. I hold it close and dear, in memory of that which we had both sworn to give up, for the greater good. For the people more important than ourselves.
I thought that it would be enough. That I could accept myself fully, just the way you had. The way I had imagined I too had, when our Story had ended.
But Eternity seems not to favour those who never strive to change. We rot in place, and leave nothing behind, save maybe dust that is quickly lost on the breeze.
Or perhaps, if we are lucky, the winds that don’t come from within somehow find their way around our authored obstacles, and eventually get to us, through our blind spots, from outside.
*
My heart is too big for my body. Everything aches, all the time. I grow, and my heart only grows with me, and so I always feel unbalanced.
The anxiety, the anguish, only stops when you hold me. When you press me close, govern my posture in that quietly dominant way of yours. You are warm and gentle and understanding, and I am afraid I might be addicted to it. To you.
I can’t take my eyes off you. I never want to step away.
I age, faster than you. I watch our friends move on. Move away, far away.
Only we remain. Together for good, as you had once promised.
(Aren’t I holding you back? Everyone else has gone off on their own. Aren’t you lonely? Don’t the comments of the people who tell you to find more friends that aren’t animals bother you? They bother me. For you. What will you do when my age finally catches up to me? Who will be there to comfort you once everyone is gone?)
I watch you dance, and cannot emulate your elegance when I try, on my webbed feet, flapping with my expanding wingspan. The feathers that grow from my flesh have now turned almost entirely white — white as the snowflakes that twirl on the frost of winter every year that passes by, decorating window sills and embellishing lakesides in a deathly calm.
A breathtaking beauty, perhaps literally so.
I watch you write, sacrifice countless hours and produce countless texts, and I watch your stories, full of Hope that we share, come true, one by one.
Always for someone else. For the greater good. For the people more important than ourselves.
Your pen moves and you whisper devotion to my benevolence. You give my charity in my stead. As if in memory of me, of what I used to be.
Until I — the current I — become aware of my true feelings, my regrets. My lies and delusions. My ugliness. I bristle, I change, and I shut you out, ashamed.
Then, I watch the panic settle in your face. Your loudest emotions are always voiceless, wordless.
The Hope that lives in your eyes turns sour, guilty. Tainted, with my ugliness. Because of me.
I know what it means. You told me. You were drunk and sleepy, and you said, murmured and slurred, that you wanted to once again hear my voice, that you missed me.
But Fakir, if you heard, you would know I had lied to you. You would know that I could never accept myself the way I am now, like you do. I could never look at myself and say ‘You are enough’. And I’ve tried and failed to take your word for it.
*
I molt my feathers, give the already dead scraps of my body to you, so that with them, through their shafts and tips, you can write me, us, a new Story. I cannot tell you to do it, and you never ask if that is what I want.
I don’t know if that is what you want. You never say, not even when you are drunk or sleepy.
You just accept me, all of me, in your personal charity, which seems to always be reserved for me alone, and I cannot bear to live with it anymore.
I have grown into the cage made for my smallest guise, and now I feel stifled.
So I run.
I run from safety, from comfort, from routine. I fly into the wilderness, and roam the sky and the woods endlessly, until the strain grounds me. Until the hunger makes me numb.
I find a lake. A different one from the one Drosselmeyer had called ‘Despair’. Or at least, I believe so.
I stay there a while, until word reaches me, carried over on the rustle of leaves and in the caws of crows and the cries of fowl, that you too have left our nest. To look for me. To find me.
(Don’t I hold you back? Why?)
I cannot stay away the moment our paths cross again. As if by design. Unplanned, by accident.
I had grown bigger still (I don’t fit into your palm anymore), more unbalanced, and yet you recognise me anyway. It is instant. It is permanent.
And I know that, even if it breaks you, I want to die in your arms when my time inevitably comes, before yours.
You will never know my inner voice again. It is too cruel to you. It is too embarrassing for me.
You will not know it again no, not so long as you keep accepting me, keep rejecting Eternity’s change for my sake. Keep stagnating so that you can honour your promise to me. Keep letting me hold you back.
You still do change in small ways — but it is always to tie yourself down. You switch to a different major at the Academy, choose a different career path. You lower your pen, until the boredom of formal language that teaching requires of you draws it out of you again, little by little.
And you keep dancing, and now you show it to others. They make you teach them, too.
And heaven forgive me for being jealous of them all — of their time with you, of every brush of your fingertips against their skin and muscle as you reposition them in your rough, measured way.
I want to learn too. I want to dance too.
I want to be close.
I’ve changed, and yet I haven’t changed at all. I just put in effort to do something and have turned around in a perfect circle, ending up back where we started. Where all hell began.
I do not yet know that that which I had seen in you as corrupted and withered by my greed had in fact always echoed my feelings exactly, with a steady pulse of Eternity’s inevitable shift. The ability to influence Eternity, to bend it to your will had, as it turns out, always been your talent.
Now, the winds turn the first page of our New Story, wrenching us free of our self-imposed shackles. By force.
They permit us to become just a bit less charitable, just a bit more selfish. They permit us not to ignore ourselves just to save someone else, allow us to stop being self-sacrificial.
They permit us to choose each other in a way that does not crash upon the shores of others’ lives and dissipates until there’s nothing left.
Like dust and ashes of those who do not move, who never change.
We shall go through another hell to learn it. Retrace our steps to unlearn our bad habits, our joint Cowardice.
We shall go through another hell, together, to learn to balance on our bleeding tiptoes, to remain upright amid the winds, as we dance to life’s roaring orchestration of our histories and futures.
Breaking free.