Here We Go A.gain

[Svenji]

{Now that she's back in the Atmosphere
With drops of Jupiter in her hair
She acts like summer and walks like rain
Reminds me that there's time to change
Since the return from her stay on the moon
She listens like spring and she talks like June;}

There was no need for better eyes, no need for better sight, for her to envision the endless canyon well – the testimony of cold, the wind in her cheeks, brushing past the locks of hair, thinning now – a doll, neglected and wasting away; what else could she be? Ah, but it did not matter now, it never mattered, and Sven could feel the wind brush, and freeze through her bones, deliciously painful, deliciously prohibited – it would take a lesser soul than hers to shrink from this feeling, or follow it blindly, but Svenji is, after all, her mother's daughter, and externally unaffected, though her soul, that shard of a chimera, burned hot against the cold of the canyon's – and there she found her old lover, the river that dented this stillness, this empty land with that indefinable breath of testosterone, and were she anyone else, she might have wallowed in pits of shrill emotion – but she would not; it was no such occasion, and she strangled emotion with the same ease she had strangled Self, and Love.

Well, it had been long, hadn't it? How many years still, since those fallacious times, when there was some pride left in the world? Certainly, it could be no different now – but one look was enough, to reassure those facetious eyes, that such was the case. Had they not huffed and puffed in holy fervor, not that long ago, bustled and stirred and whined and ranted and vented their miseries? Yet, they had been spared – they had been idiots, no doubt, but at least the blinkers were still firmly upon their eyes, steadfastly glued to their place.

One look. That was all that mattered to untie the shackles and unfasten the laces that had for so long strangled her – one look from Svenji's black, derisive eyes, to find their match, down to the clear disgust, in another set – these green and cool as emeralds kept in the bottom of chests, sunk in the sea; and had she not stared with indifference then, with such slitted eyes, and such upturn of chin – to send a white mane tumbling, upon her ivory neck? She could not speak, not Svenji, who slipped black and unseen through her jungle, for no reason other than haunt these old paths, and feast off the wild beehives, which hide poison; and a shadow not so much younger, but seeming so pure and innocent in her silky, baby cloth, trailing her wake with cautious attention to everything, that it disguised her true age and masked her true self.

It was foolish to return – but forgive a broken angel's epiphany; she wanted to feel this land brush her one last time, the moss giving in beneath her feet, and the cool press of frost against her shoulder, when she felt a rough tree-bark – gnarled and timid as she was, rugged by a thousand storms and many more years of life and death. It left a smudge of blood, tenderly hot in her skin, prickled the scales that still held steadfast to leg, shoulders and neck – Svenji laughed inwardly at this, blood, such simple thing and yet people paid so much care to blood and all it represented – idiots, them all, as her slashed mother used to say, half-laughing, half-despairing in the long agony of her death.

{Tell me, did you sail across the sun?
Did you make it to the milky way to see the lights all faded
And that heaven is overrated?

Tell me, did you fall for a shooting star?
One without a permanent scar
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out There;}