this a character sketch i had to write for a class of mine, and i figured since it is about marilla, might as well post it here! it falls more into her original verse, but it’s still very much her! i hope you enjoy c:
Even so far inland Marilla walks like she belongs at sea, each step uncertain on certain ground as if she expects it to pitch beneath her feet. Just as the wooden planking of salt-stained ship decks provides far more comfort than the vomit and mead-tainted tavern floors no matter how prettily she smiles and pretends not to see the differences, habits such as these cannot be broken so easily when they have been ingrained by too many nights of stars reflected in saltwater and lifetimes half-remembered. The exhaustion she feels now from her shift only settles skin deep, overshadowed by the same thing that causes the missing chinks of her smile and drowned out in the unsettled restlessness that comes with being in one place too long.
When only the pitying drunks remain staring into the bottom of their tankards for answers Mar can take it no longer and runs from cloying lays of damp sweat and regurgitated drink into the chill night lit by the moon, blue eyes seeking the stars splattered overhead across a black velvet sky. They are the same stars sailors navigate by. That I navigated by. she tells herself, fingers tangling in the stained fabric her skirts as she remembers the feeling of salt sticking to olive skin (the swooping in her stomach as the ship rode down from wave tip to trough, and a breeze rolling over foaming waters to play to dark tresses loose about her face). The thought hardly brings a modicum of comfort when the blood thumping laboriously through her heart is acutely aware of the leagues stretching between her and the thunderous sea.
Get away, some part of her whispers, and it sounds suspiciously like the voice in her dreams that speaks of reincarnated sea goddesses and the freedom found on open seas. Breath catches in her throat despite the fresher air outside the tavern, feet moving of their own accord until she’s racing through slumbering streets seeking anything to make the aching impossible desire to feel the tug of the ocean and bend it to her will hurt a little less.
Too soon her desperate steps halt. The broken outerwall of the city stretches before her, and without hesitation Mar digs her fingers into the weaknesses worn by time and pulls herself higher. The strength she finds in her limbs now is different from that of the feral child that roamed the port city and scaled building walls to the angry tones of shopkeepers and tenants. “Ya can’t tell me what ta do!” she yelled back then, and the wild ocean in her veins had roared in approval. Now she does not yell as she pulls herself up onto the flat top of the wall, but the ocean still rumbles against the shores of her heart, impatient, waiting to be let out. Ya can’t tell me what to do, she wants to scream at the war that chased her off her beloved sea.
The wind that buffets her figure and tangles black hair into nets around her face does not smell like the salt and seaweed. Mar pauses at the very edge and closes her eyes, chest expanding for a moment as lungs collect air rolling in from the flatlands around them –sweeter than the scents of the city (sweat and nightsoil and fruit turning to soil). It is almost freeing to perch here, to be closer to the sky and farther from the dust collecting in streets. Perhaps if she thinks hard enough, calls up memories of voyages full of a captain’s ocean roughened-smile and sea shanties sung in tipsy tones, she can pretend she stands not with uncertain feet planted firm on certain ground.
There are echoes of past lives she doesn’t remember save for in dreams, and as of late Mar has begun to feel the memories at sea that are irrevocably hers are slipping between her fingers –less Mar and more like one of her past lives. She sighs, breath hissed out between parted lips and gaze dropping from the nostalgic expanse of stars some captain far away on a pitching deck uses to right his course.
The ocean inside her falls quiet for once.
