you aren't born with strength, you cultivate it

RHYS | I feel the pages turning

Written/published: 14 MAY 2023

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Charcoal-brown meets identical eyes, eyes just like his, eyes scarily similar to dead, cold, lifeless ones. Eyes that shouldn't be present on another person. Eyes he hasn't seen in a decade.

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"I feel the pages turning

I see the candle burning down

Before my eyes

Before my wild eyes

I feel you holding me

Tighter, I cannot see"

Breathe | Fleurie, Tommee Profitt

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TW: mentioned kidnapping, PTSD

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Winifred Valentine; a woman of few words, and even fewer interactions. She often keeps to herself and doesn't communicate with anyone but the only family member that cares for her. Her older brother, Rhys (or as she likes to call him; Rye), is her pillar. He's her strength, her support, her shoulder to cry on, her hand to hold. He's her everything, as she is to him. They've only had each other their whole lives. At least, Winifred's had him ever since their parents didn't come to pick her up after school that one day. That day that left her brother different, changed, foreign yet still that wall to protect her from harm. While her brother began to smile less, laugh less, fail school, he was still there for her as an unchanging, impenetrable force. It wasn't until she was twenty that he finally confided in her and explained what he saw, explained the horrors he was forced to endure and the fact that he was unable to do anything about it. Rye told her his guilt, his grief, and poured the emotions on her shoulders so she could help lighten the burden upon his conscience and carry it with him.

He was her pillar, and always will be, but her pillar began forming fissures and cracks in the beautiful, pristine marble. The pure white of the marble began deteriorating. An off-white, unsettling color took its place, graying and fraying at the seams. Her brother, her light, began losing his. Winifred began seeing him less, she began hearing from him less. From the times she spoke with him, it felt like all life was drained from him. She hardly saw him. But, when she did, he always wore long sleeves, was always injured in some way, always looked around, panicked, as if he expected someone to come for him. He was paranoid, skittish, and avoidant to touch. At twenty-two, the woman knew, well and truly, in her heart that something was wrong with her brother and the woman he decided to marry. The woman that trapped him with a child.

Don't get Winifred wrong, she absolutely adores Jennifer (Jen, Jenny, sweetheart, little bee), but the woman who birthed her was far from pleasant. The woman could tell, after some researching of her brother's signs, that their relationship wasn't healthy, whatever was going on. But, after that realization, all contact with her pillar, her fading light, was cut. She even ended up reporting her brother as missing when she didn't find him, nor his "family," at their last house. All she got back from that report was a reassurance that he was alive, but no further investigation when she informed the police of the signs she caught. One even had the audacity to call her "jealous" of Rye and Cameron's relationship.

And then, one day, she found herself in a dark room with no light. She wasn't in her studio apartment and was without her hearing aids. She was blind, deaf, and couldn't pick up what she was smelling. But, when the light shone on her, she wished she was still blind.