Silver Claws

27. Keep patience close

My soul is gorged upon by my sorrow.

Is it possible to die from shame? To want to hide so badly that your body collapses in upon itself like a concaving burrow.

The tomb in my chest has overtaken the body. I am suffocated. I hate myself too much to scream. I'm in too much pain to breathe.

Words rose and fell around me. Spoken above me, about me, to me. I listen to nothing, picked up no sentence and threw none back to the speaker. I stood in the line, numbly. My legs could have been wind or stone and I wouldn't have been able to tell.

So this what it means to be buried alive.

Would I ever get used to this? Would the sting ever fade? Each time it became bearable, livable, something new came to scrape the wound so that it was gaping open. I felt what Logan felt. I heard what he thought. Nothing was hidden.

It had been errant, flickering fast between sentences.

I'm his burden, a burden forced onto his back. He resents. A resented burden he could remove.

My chest is too tight. No air reaches my lungs.

I wander away. I do not answer calls to my name. Faster and faster, my feet sink into the squishing earth until I am an arrow shot from a bow. I do not go far, the woods do not thin into rocky cliffs that give way to my beloved ocean. I long for it in a way that I never thought possible, akin to a lover.

A soft scream contained by dry closed lips, I try to breathe past the crushing tomb that fills my lungs with dirt. Remove. Replace. Repulsion. Obligation. The truth was real now. We would never grow from this, ever. Civility was out of the question. Even if he could ever forgive me for being wild, I could never forgive him for the betrayal against me. An atrocity against my soul.

I decide without thinking. Just for a little while. I must see my homeland. I will come back, the evil bond though prickling is bearable because we both know I will return.

I kick my shoes off, they are useless when all I want is to feel the earth. I think about removing my clothes so they aren't torn or shed, but I want to feel the air on my bare skin. Through fur won't be satisfying enough. I want the salt water to embrace my skin without scales.

I break into a run that gets faster and faster, I all but scorch the earth as first. Then, my feet are less than whispers upon the earth, without wings I fly. I make my way up a proud pine, my hands scarcely touching the damp bark. I start to leap from tree to tree, sometimes swinging sometimes jumping; but every move is silent. I am still myself, the silent weapon that even my own kind is afraid of.

It takes longer than flying, but the rush of wind in my face is worth it. Flying would have allowed my mind to wander. It requires all of my attention to land, to reach. The skin of my hand tears and bleeds with the roughness of the evergreens. Adrenaline spiking when I climb higher, where the branches are thin and unstable. I move with so much accuracy and silence that no animal is disturbed, like a spirit among nature.

A flutter against my brain, a probing. I push it away viciously, I hope it hurt him to feel the harsh thrust.

The landscape begins to get rockier, and if it were possible I went even faster. There was no delay between thought and action, the moment I wanted to jump I was already about to land. A sound built up from my sternum naturally, one I didn't recognize. Not a laugh or a True Call, something between.

I dropped gracefully from the trees to reach the earth, coiled and sprang one last time so that I was falling into open air. The sea rushed forward to meet me, an embrace.