Re: carnival: sparrow/matt
He didn't make anything worse for her. It wasn't that easy, and she wasn't that sad. The really, really good thing about absence, was that she didn't mourn in the way she would if she remembered. There was nothing she wanted, and there was nothing she needed, which came with its own brand of sadness, and with its own yearning, but it wasn't bad, and he didn't make it worse.
It took time to remember anything, that was what he said, but she didn't think she would remember. For her, it wasn't some foggy thickness that obscured unremembered things. Non, for her it was simply lack, simply void, as if there'd never been anything there ever. She was a nothing, and there was nothing tying her down and keeping her grounded in any kind of reality. So, she floated, her like some unknown and wandering princess in a long forgotten fairy tale. Perhaps she had people somewhere, someone who missed her and yearned for her touch. She thought about that sometimes, that maybe someone knew the scent of her skin much better than she knew it herself. But those were things for late nights, with the sounds of the woods quietly muted outside the airstream, and with her alone and just her thoughts for companionship.
Now, he was here, and she focused on him with a voraciousness that was unfocused. She was alone in her head all the time, because memories were like friends, and she had none. So, when people came, she was really present, and it was like the curtain lifted on a stage and this was her time to be.
"I don't think it's the season of death." She didn't have to translate the French to English in her mind, and she'd realized that right away. That French was there, quick and easy, though it didn't come to her lips with the immediacy that English did, as if she spoke English more than French. "It's pretty, the cold and the dark, and it's like the world sleeps until warmth comes again." But then shadows came and claimed pale features. "But this winter is dangerous."
And then the dark was gone, like it had never come, and her smile returned on warm and inviting lips. "Votre français est bon."