1177. Wounded minds, 7
(Armylè)
Elsewhere in the city, someone else was not getting over what had happened.
My sweet Elyne woke up in a jolt, saying her late sister’s name in the moment of panic.
She was oozing and dripping body and soul, and each anxious dream tormented her a little further.
She was not getting better with time.
Her heart was beating still too fast and it took her a while to recompose herself. She didn’t check the time. She was drenched in cold sweat and clumsily pulled herself out of her bed. To go toward the shower.
She was in pain, so much pain she couldn’t describe it.
And Elyne lived alone unfortunately, in this small apartment where the smell of a depressive laziness was heavy. Her sheets were stained.
Elyne spoke alone, loosely hoping to be heard by her twin. The vain hope like in the past, that perhaps she would hear and return, even if now it was to be out of nowhere...
She scrubbed her skin without energy. She was no longer looking as athletic as she used to be, drifting.
Her mind was pulled back to these echoes and dreams.
The insipid rain of her shower didn’t wash everything. Some of the more painful dreams returned regularly.
One especially, the instant where she had felt Prume seemingly dying in her arms.
It was years priors, but for Elyne’s brain it felt as if that memory had been the last. Partially because she had not been there for the real end, and it was unbearable.
Elyne saw that snow again, sometimes floating seemingly around them.
The terror in Prume’s eyes, and the sensation of implosion from her heart.
Prume’s eyes remaining unresponsive and wide open, her strength vanishing. Elyne catching her, calling her, crying, begging her...
Prume was drowning in that weird ocean, celestial or nothingness. Her senses losing connection and all that made her human and alive rapidly. Her body dying, Prume was no longer blinking. She teared up, unable to breathe.
Elyne felt some of what her sister suffered back then. How her entire being was melting inside, diluting itself into the world as if there was nothing else. A droplet of milk in a sea of coffee.
These few seconds of rekindled terror stressed Elyne again. She nervously gripped the edge of her shower.
She was powerless. All her strength had been for nothing. And she saw again dying in her arms the one she couldn’t live without. Prume died. Prume was dying... Prume was dead.
Elyne tensed up and clenched again there.
She refused it, and moaned it again.
Elyne felt the tears return. She wasn’t hitting the wall anymore, but letting herself fall there.
Living this death repeatedly in dreams and memories, it kept hurting her. She wasn’t healing.
Elyne felt again the life escaping her fingers and vanishing. Each and every time this precious existence slid away, she felt as if a part of her own soul was dissolved along. It was unbearable and kept decaying.
Elyne begged her sister again, in vain.
~
Months had passed, rhythmed by these sharper moments of pain.
Elyne had felt as if she’d been tortured all this lonely time. She had lost most of herself along this fall. She dug.
Much to my sorrow as well, she had turned into a mere shade of her former self. Depressed. Feeling as if gutted out from her vital organs and condemned to endless agony.
Her being had lost all the significance she could see, because like Néphéline she had put too much of her own identity above Prume’s slimmer shoulders.
She had not managed to grow sufficiently away from her, and now felt like the end of her love meant the end of her life. My poor girl...
Now all that defined her was this suffering and this feeling of loss.
Elyne cried, her heart burn still aching. Her mind still wounded repeating the memories most painful without thinking. The traumatic events were playing on repeat, her brain not letting her rest. Every morning returned both the painful dream and the sadder reality. She was in Tartarus, unable to understand why.
How did this happen she wondered.
All felt loss from the muddy perspective remaining to her.
She was oddly convinced that Prume was indeed dead. She couldn’t accept it, but she believed it. It was unacceptable, but there had been zero sign of her survival. If anything, Elyne had never felt so abandoned by her, even when Prume had been asleep.
Prume was gone, entirely.
But as much as Elyne struggled with the idea, she couldn’t do anything. She found no way out from her torment.
Her pillow and bedding had turned spongy. She cried and sweat too much lately. She twisted the atmosphere around her into a damp environment. It reflected the emotion she was trying to escape from.
Her existence remained stuck. On these events related to death.
Elyne recalled Prume’s face and wider blue eyes. The pupils almost invisible because of how dark her irises were. But she could see. And the scars...
She almost wished she could hallucinate her presence by her side, but she never turned so sad and damaged. She could wish for it, but Prume was only left inside her memories, and nowhere else.
Elyne recalled her look in sighs. These sad looking eyes with shadows under them. Elyne recalled the weirder lips exhaling one last time before her, quietly. She became tensed again. That expression was haunting Elyne.
Obsessed, she was.
About her sister and that sudden grief reminding Elyne of her.
She abandoned herself away from me.
I could have helped at least a little, but I was shut away. And I didn’t harass her to open her door to me. Because I was myself a little floating, and I still believed in her.
Either way, Elyne refused my visits. It was not me she wanted to see again or listen to. And I probably reminded Elyne of her a little. It was painful.
The only place she could see Prume again, was in her dreams and fantasies. At the cost of endless suffering, perhaps she felt that a memento kept some of her holy presence alive with her.
In prayers, hopeless prayers.
Elyne didn’t manage to get over her grief at that time.
~
Elyne cried again. Her day was spent miserably so, similar to most others.
She had lost perception of time a while ago, and was rolling in that misery like pig in sty. She wasn’t sure whether her birthday had come for this year already.
And she couldn’t get over calling me for help, or anything really. Opening her door to me hurt her too much and I eventually stopped coming by.
She was rotting slowly.
Her meals became pointlessly light. She forgot what she ate. Taste was long gone behind permanent nausea. She had no appetite. But she still managed to move her body and not completely let herself fall into a wreck. She must have been eating a little once in a while.
Her life was rhythmed by the loss of hope along the recursive remembrance of the painful moments where Prume died again and again. When she was really asleep, the dreams mixed everything into more grotesque horror stories, but still always expressing that essential pain.
Elyne was trying to deny some of the grosser nightmare she could have and were shocking her. But things were rotting in her mind. Dreams did not help. Now they made things go worse.
Her psychological disorder was not getting better yet, she was reaching the lower point of that life wave rather.
So everything was at its ugliest, and she was supressing the nightmares she couldn’t handle yet.
Elyne was reaching closer to the edge of most painful thinking.
Contemplating to end it.
All because the one that apparently fuelled her life was gone... The sadder beings.
She didn’t embrace the morbid thoughts, but she let herself slip toward them. And thankfully she was lively enough to refuse them. Her own pain was deep, but still on the right side of things.
She wanted to live, not to kill herself. There was nothing behind the end and she knew that.
Just hold on sweetheart. And crawl back. Muddy, bloody, gritty, but eventually...
Her pain was staining the sight of death in the right direction. As much as she struggled in her hole, she was not looking to let go or go further down voluntarily.
What she wanted was a name, just her name, that meant life for her.
Even if she couldn’t unstitch the irrational hope from the affection, and the pain, she was still looking toward her in the obstinate way. Elyne wanted to remain alive and suffer missing her, never embrace death to insanely hope joining her.
She felt supreme pain, total, but still looked away from the suicidal end, to embrace the pain of being alive and possibly hope for another day and change. Even if she was all blind, even if she was lost. Even if she had fallen a long way down, she would inexorably fight and crawl her way back.
She cried. She spat. She knew her torture would last for months, for years. Maybe for ever in her life...
Yet that was the only meaningful way to life.
Try. Even if you’ve been locked in a cave for so long that you forgot what to see. Even if the walls of the well are slippery. Never stop fighting. Endure. Persevere. Tenacity is bravery.
Elyne was crying, but never giving up on life or her love for her. That bond she couldn’t describe otherwise but as love, even though it defined a much wider reality.
She had nothing better. It was for love. Even then. Even if it brought more pain than anything else at this point.
Even if the word was not the better one, she had no other.
Just as she had no better names for all the shades that had followed them all these years.
She couldn’t name Diaaledaart’s emissaries as ilyinaes. Not yet.
The only certitudes she had, was that this so called love gave her a drive. It always had.
And the one I shared with her repeatedly.
That Elyne was indomitable. She would not be defeated by sorrow. Not even now. Her perceptions of reality could be shred apart because Prume had died, but this would not be the end. Even under that immense pain, she would never kneel down and bow her head. Elyne had stronger flames to animate her.
No matter the names, no matter the pain.
Elyne cried, unable to describe what they had been and how she felt. But she yelled her way through it, never embracing abandon and death. Her body could remain in constant pain. Her soul could remain ripped and lost. She felt as if that ocean sight had reached her as well.
It had begun to bud for her as well.
She was on her knees perhaps, but never bowing her head. She was gritting her teeth and growling somewhere.
I knew that monster inside. She could have had ruby eyes to express it.
I knew I could count and believe in that tenacious side of her.
So Elyne was just a sad phantom of her past self, wandering through her cave currently. Day and night didn’t matter. She sweat and reflected how she felt inside.
For now she was no longer studying, nor acting like a citizen in any proper way currently. Nothing seemed to change around her. She just weakened as she was holding her wounds together inside.
Her body was weakening, far from her prime, but still resilient in ways to bet upon. No matter what you threw at her, or deprived her from...
When she saw herself in the mirrors, Elyne could see her muscles and bones more etched; as she was losing the fat otherwise smoothing their lines. When she contracted herself to cry, sometimes it hurt in strains.
When she was hitting the walls, it was still them shivering more than her bones and skin.
And in her good eye, she could still see that sensation. That emotion far from abandon and sorrow. She was a mess, but there was still a good seed below sadness.
And her body continued to live for that. Surviving with incomprehensible vigour. Most was gone in exhaustion, but their root remained. Forever...
Every awakening was a new trauma exhausting her. Her head hurt her in migraines growing stronger.
The root of her hair in the middle of her forehead was itching her permanently. She scratched herself to scabs around her citizen’s implant. Sometime the blood dripping there was darker.
Everything looked dire.
Yet...
Elyne would remain true to herself in the end.
~
