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BY THE PRECEPTS OF HER PURITY
The same breeze that was drifting the ocean shifted in her ears as it landed — But she was a rock. She was an anemic element. She was a silhouet shrouded in the cloak of something without the flow of blood, without veins, without a heart, she kept repeating to herself in her mind, even as the sounds punished her with the contrary. If she was nothing, at least it would make sense to not want anything.
Her body had become one with the beach, lay now sunken in the coarse sand that had seemed to want to make space for her shape as it had continued to flow in and out of her range. From her tilted view of the horizon she watched the color of the sun falter, deepen and slowly sink as the clock ticked on. She would’ve even almost sworn she heard that sound; the ticking of a clockwork, but, as she realized quickly after looking, they had merely been the sounds of hoofs on the raw sand trailing the shoreline, drawing nearer.
The curiosity of something alive mustered and crawled upwards like a crab out of the sand. And up, up, up went her alabaster head along with it, blinking its white eyelashes as the sun broke on her wet, salt-washed skin. Through the heavy light she could see the figure of a familiar-looking stallion that appeared to be aiming his steps at her. She had squeezed her eyes together, frowning for recognition. Only when his voice rang against her eardrums did she recognize who this was. At first she felt her breathing waver, memories of a certain night, that had been totally her fault, occurring back into her emptied* brain. For a moment, she felt like she shouldn’t be laying here, as if it could remind him of the way she had lain with him that morning (silly), as it was reminding her now — Lying here, in the embrace of the sand and the sea, she wondered just as childishly if it would make him jealous. She hadn’t seen him since. It was so long ago already, she wondered why it would matter to either of them now. He had been the one with dust on his heart, the one who she had helped to feel at ease, unwind — Yes, she might as well formulate it like that.
Looking up into his blue, sun-glazed eyes, she snorted in her upcoming laugh, for why would he ask such a thing? However, the first concern that crossed her now disturbed mind was: Had she then not been able to become one with the beach; a grain among the sand? Had he not been admiring her transformation from a complicated existence with a heart, to a simplistic, anemic growth? Even after she had finally felt the acceptance of nature around her, was she such a blight, such an out-of-place being in this pristine environment to him that he truly felt like having to ask her if she was okay? (Could one not meditate without the rising assumptions that one was either mentally unstable or near death?) Or was it so that he just needed a reason to spark up a conversation with her? The growing curiosity of what reasoning may be behind this particular opening sentence made her feel like she should at least give him the chance to openly misunderstand such an obvious situation.
She scraped her throat, one of her wings rising to protect her eyes against the sun like a cap before she spoke. “Why?” she asked. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Because she had realized she wanted to hear him explain, for; even in all the little time they had spend together, even though she remembered all the words she had said, even though she had remembered the sound of his voice, she did not know why, because she remembered his silence more.
* empty because of the attempt to become a rock
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