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My daughter,
You're another year older. So am I. To me, we all age together. But I don't know if that's true.
Did you know your little brother had the same birthday as me? It's true. I thought about naming him for... nevermind. It doesn't matter.
Or would you like to hear about your older brother, maybe? He'd be so old, now, I'm sure he'd have children of his own. Maybe you would, too. Would you have let me hold them to me when they were born, or lick the afterbirth from their shivering blue bodies? We could raise them together. We could have been a family like that. Close. Bodies touching, bodies swaying, always trusting in each other.
We were all beautiful creatures, you know. All of us.
I don't know, anymore, when or why we all died. On that day, the day of my thirteenth birthday, I left the Basin just before the morning and by the time the sun rose I found myself completely alone in the frostbreath steppe. I was crying. The wind was in my hair, it was bitter and cold, and I felt my body growing older.
I hadn't really fallen to the ground, I'd just sagged. Every year I was losing muscle, every year I found new white hairs and noticed my teeth were duller. But that year was the hardest, I think. Because that was the year I'd given up. I couldn't find the blue mare, the ocean child that I'd searched the whole world for, and I had reached the edge of the world. There was nothing beyond this but ocean--if she was there, she was rotting at the bottom.
And it occurred to me, as I knelt in the fresh snow and let wind tangle my hair in ragged arctic brush, that maybe looking for her was a waste of time. Wasn't it just a distraction from all that I had lost in my life?
I was trying not to think about you, then. It wasn't because I didn't love you; I will always love you. But I was growing older, I was always growing older. Do you know how hard that is, my love?
Even now I'm lying to myself, I'm telling myself you'll be older too in just a few months. But you won't be, will you? I am growing older, but for my whole life you have never been more than the ghost of a corpse. I couldn't admit that so easy. No one can.
You were my baby.
In the snow, in the cold, I lay upon the frozen earth and cried. It was my birthday. I was thirteen years old. You were dead.
@Rhiannon
