Gallant

When people see tears, they stop listening to your hands or your words or anything else you have to say. And it doesn’t matter if the tears are angry or sad, frightened or frustrated. All they see is a girl crying.

The kind of dark that tricks the eye. Makes you see things where there are none. Or miss things when they are there. The dark that lives in the spaces you know you should not look, lest you catch sight of other eyes, staring back.

in her mind a family was a sprawling thing, an orchard full of roots and branches.

Free—a small word for such a magnificent thing.

Sometimes, right after she wakes, there is a kind of filament, like spider silk, clinging to her skin. That strange sense of something just out of reach, an image bobbing on the surface before rippling away. But then it’s gone.

She, who wanted to scream, not in pain but sheer exasperated fury that there was so much noise inside her, and she could not let it out.

“In my dreams, I am always losing you. In my waking, you are already lost.”

Her mother, who has always been a mystery, an empty space, an outline, the edges just firm enough to mark the absence