Seventeen

𝖎𝖎. that dances on aching teeth.

'Help' wasn't a word Solaris liked using: it made her feel like the thunderstorm left standing alone beside the white delphiniums planted on the garden's soil, right by Mother Mary's statue, staring sadly at it. She was a disruption, a natural disaster weighed as a catastrophic threat, beautiful and breathless, mindful and heartless. She treated it like a curse.

         When Solaris was growing up, she'd go to church on every sunday with a family who never loved her. When the pastor spoke about Judith, her mother turned to her and mouthed that's you, before turning her head and listening again. He spoke of how she pushed the Assyrian's tent flap with a deep cut knife in her belt and sprinted out of the home, dressed in blood, like a pretty princess dancing in her scarlet ball gown. Judith didn't sleep well after that, the same way Solaris couldn't sleep at the devil's hour, kneeling and begging to be loved, cared for— that sunday, and every sunday that followed, became her hell.

          Solaris was in a lot of pain: her becoming had Hermione's silhouette. God buried tiger skin, wolf-teeth and forbidden apples in the hollow depths of her. If Solaris could chew sunlight and place it on her empty spaces and bask in the damp silence of her loneliness, she would have. But there she was, fifteen and in her white knee socks with Judith's passage on the worn out pocket of her jeans. She looked like Eve and sinned like Lilith, she was a pest, dining and dancing on God's fortune: if God was so good, why did he make her ache like a killer who swam in the seven deadly sins? She was tired. So very fucking tired. To Solaris, religion was a safety net and a blanket of safety, because if God ever did hear her— he'd label her as a prisoner in the hell he's created.

         And it wasn't an exquisite pain, either.

         It wasn't the pain where you'd laugh so hard, it'd make your insides hurt, or the pain you felt when your first love gave you a handwritten letter: to Solaris. It wasn't the tickling hurt you'd feel while the rollercoaster comes up higher and higher, where your tummy aches and builds with its intensity before it drops in a split second.

         It was the pain you'd feel when you've cried too hard, the drying eyes blinking up and you're called a victim of their soul-breaking crime. It's the pain you feel when your first love leaves you and tears up the handwritten letters: to Solaris. And as the pain builds higher, this kind of ache never dropped. It just grew higher, even more intense and stronger than it was.

         Her pain was such a prolonged ache. She made her own eulogies for her own funeral in fear that no one would care enough to feel that way for her: to feel that way at all, or even attend:

            Dear Me,

you're laying in an open-casket, tulips are blooming by your head and as they all walk by empty-handed and bid their prayers to you. For once, you seem peaceful. Your wrists are ragged patchworks with layers of drying blood laying flat beneath them. Your chest no longer heaves. Your eyes no longer water. You no longer hurt. You're being weaved into dark skies, the moon's cluster lays on the crevices of your face. You look like you're sleeping, like you've finally escaped the insomnia you walked with in the asylum you called your mind. You're in a black dress, your eyes are closed: dare I say you look pretty whilst dead? I hope you find peace. You're finally asleep.

           Every suicide note came in stapled with a eulogy. No one truly would ever care, but her mind was in soft shoelace knots, carving its belladonna onto her thick skull: no one cares. She had wished to love, but never reveal.

          Her eyes were pinned open, she stared at Hermione; help. She was deemed a prisoner in her own canvas, she had tried to scream but it echoed back and scarred her poor, pretty ears, so she settles for a whimper. Help me, please. Hermione had looked closer, Solaris was the only problem Hermione couldn't solve— the only puzzle she couldn't align, piece by piece. She had tried asking, too. It was a higher spell, a spell she'd wish to break. The poor girl stuck in the painting whimpered, Hermione came even closer:

          "I'll get you out," Hermione whispered. "I promise." She never promised, she sighed and closed her eyes.

          Solaris was hung on the wall, looking like My Last Duchess in her ball gown stitched with ivory silk, she mouthed another help.

          "I will." I wish I could.

          The silence terrified Hermione, she had read so much until she's finally found how to bring Solaris out of the mirror.

          It only spiralled downwards from then on.