so long, we'd become the flowers
a/n: merry christmas and happy holidays to everyone!
It’s a cramped, messy, thing, but it’s hers and hers alone.
She loves the sting of thorns in her skin, the scrape of worn wood against dry skin. When her skin tears and exposes flesh to the winter air, it is a triumph. With every drop of her blood that spills into the soil, she imagines the roots of her flowers absorbing it and growing strong, healthy, alive. The flowers are everything her friends never had the chance to be.
Sometimes, Zoya wonders if it would be so bad to go out and lay in the middle of it, to close her eyes and let the vines curl over her limbs, to let blossoms bloom from her bones until she was once again with the ghosts she kept as closely as a lover. It would be nice, she thinks. Quiet.
The man beneath her asks about her family, but Zoya’s lungs are filled with petals and stems and roots where there should be air. She presses her lips to his instead of answering to forget that she needs to breathe.
In her dreams, the earth cracks open and swallows her whole. The heart of the world welcomes her into its arms; it feels like returning to a home that no longer exists. She does not want to stay, but she cannot decide to leave. Vines wrap around her hesitant limbs, moss creeps over her skin, and her decision is made for her. She wakes up, panting, her mind still moored to a phantom world where dead is alive and alive is dead.
She finds herself wading through the flowers on the nights she can’t sleep, thorns catching at her silk clothes. She pulls weeds. She prunes the leaves. She plants new seeds. The garden grows. The garden grows, and Zoya withers.
The winter is long and bitter.
When it passes, as all things must, Zoya plants a flower for herself.