Things

I am Leonette.

The introduction had an odd feel to it, meeting him as if it were the first time .. it was. Regardless of all that had transpired before this moment, we were facing each other as wholly new creatures. I reveled in the feel and felt the brittleness of ... first encounters as well. It felt as if I were holding something delicately fragile in my hands .. unseen though knowing it was precious, worth anything and everything that it took to hold it tight so that it could not slip away and fearing that tightening my grasp would crumble it between my fingers. Fonce ... it means torn, it means darkness. I tasted his name and all of the flavor of its meanings then let it spill off my lips. Fonce ... Inside I was screaming ... please do not pull away ... stay with me ... here. Even as I did, I felt my grasp loosening even in the primalality so that I didn't destroy the pale etchings before they could even form. I opened the flap wider letting in a bit of light. When he had time, I had things to ask .. not of what had just happened but ... well ... I held up my hand as if he could see the invisible forces that cradled in my palm ... things ... destinies, fates, dreams. Was I already curling my hand too tight in the poignancy of the moment? I added quickly far safer subjects as some protective barrier around the things that go bump in the night, a gentle force field surrounding the outside ... clans, thoughts.

Things.

There were things to do, things to get from the slave wagon, things to see to, things to begin and things to turn loose of. Did I appear to him as some high spirited little filly as I pranced away, eager to begin all of the "things" that this new journey would lay at my feet? If so then it is the image that I wanted to linger in his mind as I turned to go.

He had been my faith, my trust, my security and my sanity as well as at times my insanity since I came here. He was my safety net walking a tightrope stretched across a universe. My belief in him had brought me to this point and now neither of us were in control. I had just placed my heart, my soul, my complete faith in the hands of something bigger than both of us.The skies themselves would form the future. They would either lay the path to the rest of cosmos at our feet or it was going to be one hell of a cruel sadistic synaptic copulation.

The wagon sides blurred in a mist as I walked away, my feet and knees becoming the same sludge that swirled in my head. When I felt the tidal wave overtake me, I clung to one of them, hands rising to the skies themselves though only reaching the wooden surface of the frame and I turned my face into the cold hard surface, silencing the shriek against the tem finish. I heard the splintering, the scraping claw of nails rending and shattering and felt the jagged lines of shredding as I let it go, let it all go.