Escape

It has been one hundred years since the day I stood in the doorway with the wind clawing its fingers through my hair and turned, finally, into its hungry embrace, deciding then that I would never look back at you.

It is the anniversary of the day I fled into the woods surrounding our cottage, woods that used to protect me, but now suffocated me, the trees lashing their branches together and spitting water down upon my shoulders as if they mourned for me, but still could not let me go.

I ran until my feet tracked blood behind me along with the remains of my soul, unspooling from me like silver thread still caught between your fingers.

It has been one hundred years since I stumbled through the rain, and the edge of the chasm yawned before me, and I closed my eyes, expecting to feel the fall, but I never did. Instead, when I opened my eyes, the stars swam before me like rungs on a ladder, and I tangled my fingers around their sharp edges and pulled myself upward. Their light lodged beneath my fingernails and my blood stained some of them so red, the astronomers peered up in shock and could not explain their unexpected jump to supernova.

When I reached the overarching dome of the universe, I banged my fists on the glass, crying for entry, but I was just a soul trapped beneath the ice, and I couldn't climb any further. The dust of the cosmos lodged in my throat and with its bitter taste in my mouth, I swam back down towards where you waited.

I lived in the branches of the trees above where you walked, I wove the stems of flowers together into crowns to adorn my hair, just to have something mortal still about me. I watched you grow older from afar, watched the life bleed out of you naturally, not like mine, not like the knife wound in my shoulder the night I fled.

When your soul shed your body like snakeskin and, shaking itself, began its own upward climb, I watched the stars until their molten silver dripped onto my cheeks like paint, allowing me the facade of tears. I saw you swim through the dome that's trapped me for, now, one hundred years. Kneeling above the Milky Way, I knit crowns out of stars, and sometimes, when I'm moved to, I place the stars in the eyes of mortals who remind me of who I could have been.