Seventeen

𝖎𝖎𝖎. they sing 'til dusk

I. When Solaris was born, she hadn't cried like a toddler would: no tears, no screams, she had been born into silence and she went out the same way.

II. Solaris, of the sun. A story called light, a romance between the silken sunlight and the abandoned windows. A drunken lacuna basking in the summer, blinding and lonely. Catherine was never fond of the moon. She wanted Solaris to be bright, beaming, like the sun. Like her Isabella.

III. Solaris' first love was Elliot Shoreman. She planted flowers on his bones, trimmed the roots and made his body the palatine of white camellias and blue violets, even though he wasn't ever meant to be a garden (no human is, really). When she was younger, her grandmother told her how ghosts haunt people, not homes- how Elli wasn't a tourist, but a spirit who would linger around her if he were her true home. He didn't stay around long enough for her to find out, but until now, she can hear the tune of his laughter and the music of his cries. Elliot never loved her, as much as she wanted him to. But it didn't ever matter, she liked to be alone, but never lonely.

She was both.

"Who are you?" Hermione gasped, hand shaking and wand pointed at Solaris. She quivered, backing up against the wall with scared eyes and the midnight moon paints her features even brighter. Open mouth, hunching shoulders, shaking, trembling. She fought the rising panic. "What are you doing in here?"

"The painting," Hermione gasped. "The spell worked?"

"It did."

"You—" She stuttered. ''You're here.''

"Yes, I am."

"What happened?" Hermione asked. "How did you get out?"

"It doesn't matter."

Her terror ascended with every syllable passing her mouth. She could taste the metal on her tongue, the twisting fear fading into her taste. She was blinded, she couldn't feel anything but the fluttering horror rising and rising, but never breaking.

"Please tell me how you got into my room," Hermione pleaded. "I swear, I won't tell— you can trust me."

Solaris sat on the floor, eyes unmoving and mouth pursed. Her skin was glowing with resin, her lips were painted a cherry pink and she stared at the wall. The moon's cluster shades her face in a perfect ivory shade, her eyes swollen with unknowingness and Hermione gives her a tight smile. She was fucking terrified of the pretty girl not batting an eye, not moving around: Hermione had never looked her in the eye, Solaris smiles back, almost as if it's a trick of ventriloquism, she reciprocates everything Hermione gives her and this birth will be the death of them.

She was a blind noon, blinding with a light she never knew she had. She was a magician's illusion, a candlelit dinner with a dragged out melancholy, a valley with blankets of indescribable sadness. It was a sorry problem, so pretty but so sad.

"I can't trust you," Solaris smiled, Hermione was trying to get through to her: something no one had ever bothered trying to do. "Much like I can't trust myself."

"Why can't you?" Hermione asked, lip quivering and shoulders hunching. "Please, I helped you get out.''

"You're a smart girl, Hermione. You'll figure it out."

Solaris looked up: December's porch light was licking the right side of her face and her pretty face was being filtered by the orange light and Hermione nearly mistakens her for the sun. A nostalgic fallacy fractures her mind and Solairis nearly gasped. Trust. Flower town with no bees, haunted house with no ghosts, cemetery with no graves; trust. A spineless phrase.

IV. Solaris made up for all the tears she didn't cry as a toddler. Her smiles were as rare as the sobs she never let out, her laughs were transparent like plastic cellophane in every colour.

V. She'd catch glowing fireflies and dance in midnights. She'd let the garden grass crawl up her legs while she twirls and twirls and falls. She would lay on her back and let the flowers stand by her head. She listened to the sound of the piano, the smell of the tulips and she wished she could grow like the flowers from their garden but she never deserved such a beautiful growth so she remained silent against the grass.

VI. Elliot Shoreman cut her favourite tulip bush. Her sour breath breathed in abruptly into her lungs while she gasped. Trust. She let him in, let him cut the roots of the parts she wished more would grow from. The melancholy made home in her veins and the sickeningly pink lemonade sighs passed through her ever so often. Trust.

Solaris could never trust Hermione, she could barely trust herself. Her eyes were always halfway shut, blades unruly trimmed against her skin, medicines falling by her feet, no hands to catch her when she'd fall and faint. Hermione was planting the fallen tulips in her garden of veins, heaven's pearly gates on her eyelashes and she smiled. Trust.

"I'll help you, I swear. But please, tell me."

"No."

Solaris fell in love with anyone she's ever dated. Whether they were kind, smart or aching: she had given everything and anything to anyone. If she couldn't love herself, then she could love Elliot, Autumn, Jayden— and she missed them all the same way. The curved knot in her throat, the endless empty path on the inside of her hallowed chest with tears kissing at her waterlines. Elliot was cold fingers, hiding in places she could never find him with another girl he'd call his own. He never really smiled, and it worried Solaris to think that he was in so much pain, so much that he couldn't even raise the ends of his mouths into faking. He wasn't good for her, he left.

Autumn was ink-smudged hands, basking in the spaces between each poetic word, songbird singing in the dead of night. Soft sleeps, a trembling brew of sadness: she had to leave. She couldn't breathe on her own, and though Solaris had held her breath to give her a brittle of her air, she felt even more suffocated. She had to leave.

Jayden was six feet tall at fourteen. Cold, unmoving and broken in every way. Kaleidoscope eyes, aquarius echoes with every heavy step he walked. Dryad trees, open fielded football, chaotic mind. He wasn't ever good for her. She had to leave.

Hermione planted flowers on her bones, but she was never meant to be a garden.

(No human is, really.)