Re: Wren + Ana: woods
Attachment was something Wren didn't know. She didn't know about attachment to a name, a label, a thing given by another. She didn't remember her maman, though she knew she had one. Everyone had a maman, even if they'd gone, and she wondered at the name the woman had given her. Wren, and she knew it now, and she had wandered out to think. To think about emptiness left in the wake of names, of things told, of things that felt like stories in a book about a girl who shared her name and her face. She didn't know about attachment, but this woman seemed to know much of such things, as if her skin was a thing accustomed to roots and the way they scratched and held firm. Wren envied that.
She didn't understand why people distracted with pottery, but Wren was seldom distracted. She sang in a tent crowded to seams, bursting with shoulders jostled. Her voice didn't mind the presence of others, and her hips still found the music in the same way. But she liked people, bodies, touch. Life, life, life, and everyone she encountered had one, and she had none, and perhaps she was different than the woman with the dark hair in this way.
"The town likes to talk. It's small, and it doesn't have much to say about itself. People marry. People die. People have children, and the cycle repeats. We're like stories in a book, they crack us open like spines and whisper about us over coffee and toast." Wren knew. She walked through town, this anachronism in the form of a woman, and the whispers chased her like those elusive memories. She didn't mind those whispers.
But she'd lingered long, and she smiled at the woman with the dark hair. "I must go." But her smile stayed long, slow and molasses drip, drop. Grey eyes became hazy, as if they saw something in the unfocused woods, in the woman before her. "We'll meet again, Ana." Surely, conviction, and there was no doubt of this.