~
Dedicated to Ophelia, the girl who drowned
Legend:
Water = ~
Air = {
Earth = ^
Air & Earth = <
~Is my existence essential?
{Goodness, my sister!
^Now, how could you slander yourself like this by asking such a question?
~Don’t you see? I am unholy. I destroy and I kill. And, yet, you still think I am essential?
< Sister!
~Did you not see her?
^What do you go on about, sister?
~ The girl. Two moons have passed since she jumped from the bluff overlooking my waters. She was a beauty that one—hair thick enough to swim in, dark eyes that twinkled gold in the starlight. Barely eighteen, and she’d drown in my waters. A child. I drowned a child. By the time I had willed my currents to settle, I was too late–she was gone.
{You mustn’t blame yourself.
~ It’s a sin to kill a Mockingbird.
{It wasn’t your sin. Nor was it the child’s. It is the brutality of this world that has corrupted innocence. It is the sadness that kills. Not you. Not the child.
~It was my waters that sunk her.
^Then by those standards, it was the metals dug from my earth that mutilated the child before she jumped. Did you not see the blood running down her wrists? Did you not see those fatal marks—that of razor blades and rust? And was it not from my precipice that she plummeted?
{Aye, and was it not my air that the child cut through? Not even I am powerful enough to bend the laws of gravity to my liking. But it is not my sin. Perhaps it is Eden’s. From the moment the apple dropped from the tree, mankind too began to fall.
~But—
<Do you blame us?
~Of course not!
<Do you think us sinners?
~Never my sisters! Never.
<Then what makes you any different?
{When we don’t understand things—and the death of an innocent is not something that can easily be made sense of—we begin to doubt ourselves. Life becomes an anxious paroxysm of “ifs” and other hypotheticals.
^We neither give or take life; we are merely the vessels through which this world’s inhabitants give or take life.
{You’ve been awfully quiet, sister.
^Do you comprehend these things we tell you?
~I suppose so.
{Well then, tell us what you have learned.
~I’ve gathered our nature is a broken one. But it was not I, nor you, nor the child that did the breaking. We are only the products of corruption. Is this correct…?
^Yes–and you must remember this.
{And you must remember the child and what the child has taught you.
~But how, sisters? How am I to do that?
^You must go on. You must live for the child who could not/
{That is how you will keep her spirit alive.
< And this is how you shall exist. This is how you shall let go.
Image Source:
Drowned girl floating atop river currents (n.d.). [image] Available at:: https://vk.com/doc2343478_437396679?hash=c3ffb364f69c59fe34&dl=f9ec840d33bf4817f4 [Accessed 24 Jul. 2018].