Stealing Lavender: Second Chapter

Chapter Two

         Lavender never kissed me. It felt as though she had, the fullness of her words pressed hard against mine. Some entities pass by each other listlessly like faceless frames that were never meant to reach out and touch you. They continue on as shadow tricks shifting in our peripherals, seemingly irrelevant to our bigger pictures. But what encompassed me, encompassed her and that pulled me into her as sure as gravity. Withstanding that motion made me heady, an obsession bubbling beneath my sheer skin just waiting to be sliced open and freed. I could feel my body leaving me for her, like rationality and sense no longer carried the strength or scythe to wield me. I told her everything I wanted to do before something killed me and she smiled impishly,
         “You remind me of Sylvia Plath,” a love letter from her beautiful mind delivered straight into my soul. Lavender was a curator of deep thought and introspection, her contemplations of the inner self and the matters that surrounded her were of utmost importance. She would observe and gaze into a person with a gentle scrutiny that was piercing, her cool hands weaving through my organs like she was searching for something. And that something, she would find because after she picked you up and turned you all around, she would know you. Inside, out.
         She was raised by her grandmother. Her father, her mother, missing pieces of puzzles designed to never be put into conclusions. She had an aunt in France. Lavender had left her that April, Versailles and the Louvre, and fell into a story about a young woman who was boundless. Lavender had carried with her the burden of unfinished histories, a lore that could feel forbidden and inaccessible whenever she moved toward it. Mara was open-ended, a stretch of rivers that emptied out into a whole guild of water to drink from. It was as if everything that could rise and fall in the world rose and fell inside her chest, a weighted breath that came with twinges of great pain. A feral spirit that cried in a language no one else could understand. Mara wore her illness as a rivière around her closed throat, the gems of her madness in labordites, obsidians, and quartz. Because as unruly as she was, she also longed for clarity and serenity. Those words were silky and invigorating in her mouth, like that time she drank cool water out of marble. Sensational enough to make you cry.
         She loved honey bees and reading prose poetry. The way a rhyme could arrive suddenly, an emotion being choked forward like acid at the back of an esophagus. Her ideas burned as they came forth, acetic clots of ferocious intent she had never known before it was spit out in her hands. Mara had read about a woman with epilepsy whose auras burst from her in hues and words, ungoverned by the sanctity of verse or structure. Or time. She resided in a realm where those atrocities were exiled and cast out as hexes from the witches that came before her. She could have been epileptic. Her brain fired in places that could only be connected to God, or something more than herself. And she was everything else.
         Mara’s whole family was faltered by diseases of the body and mind. In fact, one might be better off constructing an ancestral tree harmonizing persons with the pieces of themselves that ailed them. Four loved ones had perished by the time she was ten. One of them being a momentumental figure that had spooled her by thread, which had twined her together for who she was. Until her death, her grandmother lived downstairs on gorgeous, hickory stone that would send quick chills up Mara’s tiny legs. Great Annie would tell Mara that her hair was the color of pennies, while she braided its lawlessness down the center of her back. She taught Mara how to win at chess and scrabble, how to sew and crochet, and how to use guts as a navigation tool. She was a quiet, reserved woman who was humbled by the world, and was never truly known for her intelligence, her kindness, or her venomous sense of humor. All of the attributes Mara worked diligently to gain in her memory.
         The only time Lavender freely spoke about her family, it was about her mother. She softly revealed that she often had a tall bird on her left shoulder. A guide. She said that it had been appearing for as long as she could remember. It had azure feathers and spoke like an elder, wise and tired from knowing the world so intimately. Like a clairvoyant, Mara was hardly surprised when she told her, leaning in closer for a secret,
         “That same bird is on my shoulder now. Not everyone can see him, but he’s there.” Mara believed her, the pungency of Lavender’s veracity like a fat cloud around her face. Mara would believe almost anything. Proven until found fabricated, she always glimmered. And out of some naivety and the act of being hopelessly heartstruck, she glanced twice. She was never one to ignore a sign.
         This was a door. Lavender’s locks unlocked just for her right then. They understood each other. She understood her; the fitfulness of their hearts distended from the ribcages that housed their byzantium minds. They were intertwined in it. But the knives of winter promised a release that left them rejected, their pulsing vines cut and discarded. Lavender grew as cold as the fingertips of January, a sky blue with lack of blood flow and compulsion. Her touch was a parasite to whatever warmth bled from Mara, a heat that never returned to her. She would attempt to tie the vines in knots, manifesting their regrowth by sheer will. She pleaded once,
         “I would do anything if it meant being with you. To be as we were.” And Lavender, well, away she went, from all the needy fingers grasping for her plastic string. She was airy and stealing distance before Mara could even extend herself to possibly catch her, her goodbye nothing but whistling wind.
         We blinked and a couple years had passed. The boy who loved me finally gave into my apathy and left me in a tomb of depression. It was endless and it was because of her. I blamed her as every ache emerged and every void called out to be pervaded by her. I desperately wanted to be loved like she could love and his love, it felt infantile and my innards tossed whenever his entity meshed with mine. My whole body felt empty, as if my spirit had gone off with Lavender and I had finally escaped. He felt that absence with me until it was unbearable. He had said, his hand on the knob of the trigger as it turned,
         “I always knew.” And I never spoke to him again.