What We Fall To
A girl sits on her bed, a flashlight clutched between her knees, pointed at a book in her hand. Slowly, she works her way through, murmuring the words, stumbling. She reads of fairies and dragons and knights and queens, and as she does, their silhouettes play on the wall before her. She reads on, only peripherally aware of the show dancing along with the words of the story, little sword fights in impossible detail. Outside, a storm rages, thunder crashing and lightning cracking. In her room, it is quiet. In her room, the humidity of the outside is not welcome, and there is only silky calm. A haven shrouded in shadow and darkness as if it were a blanket.
A girl reads and shadows play around her.
The world is motionless ice outside the window, the type of cold that swallows the possibility of life or sound. She can remember the bite of the snow on her hands, eating away at her, hardening her, flakes in her eyes, wind tugging at her ears as she trekked through covered sidewalks on the way home, hands and chin retreating into her down coat that was not keeping her in the least bit warm. But she is inside now, wrapped in blankets, her cold hands curled around a steaming mug of tea. It’s painfully hot right now, contrasted against her burning coolness. Her eyes flicker closed, but she does not sleep; she simply rests in this haven, smiling in the middle of a tempest. Shadows retreat to the far corners, resting under furniture and dancing idly in the flames of the fireplace.
A young woman stands in a tree, feet gripping a branch, hand braced against the trunk, watching the world pass below her. She would sit, let the branches caress her, but that feels like giving up somehow. Nothing is ever accomplished by sitting down. Nothing gets better by sitting down. The mute of casual conversation passes below, and she focuses on blurring the words to white noise as warm tears brush down her face and a migraine pulses through her skull, pushing and pushing relentlessly. Slowly, she weaves darkness through her fingers like string, steadying her breath to the flowing rhythm of the motion.
~
She’s at the local state park, path abandoned a ways back. Tall, flowering grasses brush against her thighs as sun beats down against her skin, pushing the shadows off her so that they trail behind her in a dark wake. In the city, no one notices one more unaccounted for shadow within the bustle of bodies and streetlights, but in the park, there is no one there who could notice; nothing but the shuffling noises of nature.
Murky figures dance around her, sparring each other with blades that do not cut and blows that do not land. Their forms wrap around the wildflowers that bob with the wind, careless of the wargames raging around them. Laughter echoes on the breeze in eerie joy. The woman supervises it all, carefully siphoning portions of her life and will into the figures, animating them with pieces of herself. She feels what they feel, and they are what she is. Pieces of her soul, distanced and formed by darkness.
It is not cold as a shadow.
When they wrapped around her, they were cool against her skin, but when she became them, everything was hot and colorful and wild to the sight, mute to the ears as if heard from underwater. She had almost lost herself when she first tried it, and then spent weeks shivering when she had returned to herself, the human existence seeming too loud, too mundane and comprehensible. Colorless.
Little pieces. That’s all she ever gave up, letting fragments of herself go for periods of time, living through the shadows. Her physical body was vacant during those times, in abandoned trances that grounded her to all that was real and solid, sitting with just enough consciousness relegated to its upkeep to keep it from slumping to the ground, just enough to remind her to return to it. All that was supposed to matter. She found herself slipping, failing to remember why all the things that were crucial in her life held any meaning. Slip, slip, and recoil back into herself, gasping and shivering. Reminding herself that she needed her physical body, needed all the mortal things she had built her life around. Reminding herself that she was solid and that was natural and that was good and that was how it was meant to be and meant to stay. Letting her essence condense to a single core deep in her chest, so heavy that it pulled her to the ground, tethering her.
Had she eased into it, letting more and more go, giving looser and looser grip, she might have kept hold of herself.
In the end, it was simple impulse. Shadows steamed off her in wispy tendrils, dissipating in the air behind her as she wandered through the all but abandoned park she was so accustomed to, her chest pushing in, her chest pushing out, stalking through the grasses, trying to notice the sunlight against her skin, trying to find color in the world. The woman was deaf to the usual unobtrusive lull of nature being nature, echoes reverberating through her mind, drowning the world out.
In the fields where she had spent so much time with her shadows, she remembered the disproportionate heat of warm tea in cold hands, the coolness of the shadows, the warmth and vibrancy of her shallow dives into the world of shadows. And since she craved light and intensity, she abandoned her body, her anchor, completely, seeping the entirety of her Self into shadow.
She was blind. Her heart rate picked up. Fear. But of course, she did not have a heart in this form, so it could not be palpitating. It was, though. Pounding, pounding, pounding, pulsing throughout her as if her entirety were a ritual drum, and she were pounding, pounding, pounding, as she burned. Because she realised then that she was burning. Everything was so that that there was no other explanation than that she was burning. She must have been on fire, except she did not have a body that could catch fire. She opened her mouth to shout, but no sound came out, though air rustled uselessly within her. Helplessness. There was everything in too small a moment, all soundless screams and heat and that pounding, pounding, pounding.
She had been mistaken about her blindness. She could see everything but in blinding definition, burning colors, pounded into her, each detail driving, drilled, into her, fighting to get her attention, pushing others away, yelling, screaming for her. She could see everything to the extent of blindness and it was not a quiet blindness but the kind that pounded through, making everything an Impossible that huddled close, begging to be grasped.
The pounding was not pushing all else away, filling her ears with everything in the world and more, but that there was nothing else to be heard because she was deaf and not in the way that she could not see because there was too much to see, too much input, but deaf in the way that she could not hear because there was absolutely nothing but perceived silence and it hurt in a different way than that not being able to see, the absence and the overflow contrasting each other and fighting and pounding and pounding and pounding.
It’s not that she stopped burning, that she suddenly saw less or more, that sound returned suddenly to her. It’s not even that she got used to it, but that she endured in agonizing paralysis until she was not a woman and so she could not be burning because shadows did not catch fire and so it could not be burning.
Burning implied wrongness. This was not wrong. It was hot. It was life when one does not have a life of their own to get in the way. Feverish, lively. Scalding but not burning.
There was no pounding because that was too simple a rhythm.
The Universe does not dance in time.
The Universe does not understand randomness.
The Shadow finds an irregular sort of normality just sane enough that it pauses, for the first time comprehending the body it exists near, vacantly supine on the ground, eyes facing endlessly upwards. There is recognition, but no identification. The Body is still pounding, pounding, pounding. But to breathe is to suffocate. To have a heart is to be tied down, and brains are blind.
It has no lungs or heart or brain. Those necessities are trivial and it does not want the burden.
The Shadow fades into the darkness of the world.
~
A girl sits on her bed, a flashlight clutched between her knees, pointed at a book in her hand. Shadows dance on the wall, content to play out a human fantasy, an entirety encapsulated in a fragment. Fairies and dragons and knights and queens dance together, all together, all One, and more, themselves but also the dark places of the world, the shadows staring out into sunshine, reveling in heat and light, silent laughter and burning coolness.