Experience Tumblr Like Never Before
Thinking about a Kiri desperate for answers who begs Ewya to see her, to talk to her, to just give her a chance. About her slipping into the water and connecting to the tree of souls when she knows she can’t. About her crying into warm sand as she racks her brain for memories she can’t quite reach and not knowing if they’re even hers.
About a Kiri meeting an aunt she never met, who brushes the hair from her face and whispers about before all this. About a school yard and a her mother as little as Tuk. She dreams of glimpses of red hair and a teacher, not a mother yet. She can’t imagine a life as peaceful as that could really be real.
A Kiri who opens her eyes and is immediately on the floor, a narrow eyed man pulls her up and holds her shoulder tight as if he didn’t shove her to the dirt the moment before. Tsutey is barely there before he is gone but she feels strong as stone. She wants to ask what he was going to say but the ground under her feet is growing growing growing until the earth reclaims her as it did him.
Her grandfather is found when she tries to bond to a tree with a shimmer in its bark. Is not a soul tree but she thinks there’s something there. He whispers about failures. About passing his burden to his youngest daughter’s oldest son. How he almost ended a cycle. How he didn’t.
She never thought about the people in bridgehead that were like Norm, Max, Trudy, Grace - they couldn’t be people in the stories or else the fires were too hot. But she breathes in the air of one of Norms meal kits and the metal floor beneath her feet is littered with candy wrappers and paper. There’s laughter, clinking of vials, a song humming through a tinny radio, and humanity feels a little too real. Her skin suddenly feels thin, her bones weaker. Her body is too big and too awkward but there’s a haze she hopes they felt all the way til the end. She never forgets how warm the sun through a window felt on such fragile skin.
Spider is so small and so stubborn and she can’t protect him. She’s screaming into the soil, begging for her mother to tell her what to do, and then the smoke fills her lungs. She gasps, breathing in fumes and choking on the poison when his eyes meet hers. Paz Socorro has his eyes, his curls in darker little ringlets. She cries, sobbing just like Kiri. She tried to get home, she tried not to leave him. She didn’t mean to start the pattern. She was only 23, she’d never done this before. Her plane burns and all she can taste are ashes but she feels her strength in her bones, trembling as they are, and she marches home like she doesn’t remember what fire tastes like.
The answers never come plain and sometimes Kiri doesn’t think she’s one person. She thinks she’s a collection. All the souls lost on pandora, gathered and loved with her ancestors or buried beneath the dirt she walks over. She tries though, again and again and again because the heartbeat thunders so loud that she swears it’s thousands of them, begging her to find them. She loves them as much as she hates them. She clings to her mother, the large and the small, and speaks with the only voice that doesn’t shake. Thinking about Kiri who calls it a blessing because a curse is ungrateful and she can’t call them something so cruel. She was never a little girl in the same way there’s always one reaching for her hand in the quiet seconds between minutes. Thinking about how Kiri can never just be Kiri but the way it’s integral to her that she can’t ever just be the one girl she was born as. How she’s not even sure which one that is.