Tomorrow, she will fly.

She kneels on stone. She tilts her head to her right shoulder and allows her eyes to fall. The music from the windows is familiar, makes her warmer, wrapped in her own arms. She tips forward, weak but only by her own permission. Her elbows hit rough gray stone. Her eyes and her fists have closed. With her nose red from the cold, inches from the floor, she breathes the freedom of loving in solitude, the freedom of walking through the world as though it belongs to her beautiful self. This moment is for her to hope and do nothing else. She hopes she can feel a key in her fingers again; to slip her fingertips over the ornate, curving metal, to hold it close to her eyes and memorize its pattern... she has poured herself into this and allows simple hope to take her whole. The thin white beads of her necklace tremble as she inhales.

De temps en temps, la vie semble un dessin sur une de ses tapisseries. Maintenant, elle regarde fixement une tapisserie, et elle se souvient les belles lèvres qui lui disaient des secrets. Elle peut voir, elle suppose, comment ce jour peut sembler une tapisserie... mais elle ne le veut pas.

As she sits curled beneath the sleeping branches of a tree near the largest, most ornate of the wooden doors, a heavy brown leaf somersaults into her temple and falls to the ground near her fingertips. Her shaking hands trace the edges of the leaf as though it's made of soft denim, and she rises to return inside. It is too cold, she knows, to be outside and so insufficiently guarded against it. Inside, she walks calmly, though less steadily than usual, to the edge of the stone fountain around which she has built this world. She takes paper from the surface of the water, and she presses the leaf into it, letting one become the other's decoration. Stars shine so brightly they seem to be inches from every window, prepared to fly into her eyes if she asks to see light. She writes:
1. tracing fingers over that nose, against those eyelashes, pressed against those lips, memorizing by touch
2. warm tea in a cup around which have twined all ten fingers
3. looping words like orange peel, ribbon, and kiss into the imagined flying of tomorrow
4. soft hair splayed over the pillow
5. closing eyes that can still see those things which will never touch again.

The night before, she closed the door to the crimson room. It fell shut with a knowing shhh of tapestries and dark-colored wood, and though she could not see inside, she knew the stone basin filled with shining, clear liquid. It glimmers, ripples, waves, salts the sides of the basin, and reflects the images she cannot see today.

gone


elle

One eyebrow bends, like a cat stretching or a back arching. Her collarbone casts its shadow in different trickling shapes of dark. Her eyes' hazel wheels rotate slowly and feel the lights of the stars fall into their well-worn places. She understands that the stars here don't ever disappear.

elle parle doucement
elle peux les voir
et quelques choses
peuvent sembler claires

The high-backed chairs in the crimson room glance in her direction at sporadic intervals. She can't see their eyes, but she feels them flickering slowly. Do they fade, or is she trying too hard to make them stay? Her fingers flurry up and down, a quiet dance to comfort herself. Her toes extend as far as they can toward the chairs grouped with their backs to her. She flurries, and hopes.

elle ne sait plus
comment etre
sans lui

She absently rearranges the uprooted grass around her crisscrossed legs. She silently races forward, self-jettisoned through a hundred shimmering bubbles hung on invisible fabric. She hooks her finger into one of the elaborate curvatures in the fountain's spurting stone, though, so that she remembers the way back to standing on the ground instead of the ceiling.

elle
et la vie
se comprennent

She has changed. She dusts her knees clean using only the pads of her fingers. The stones feel warm beneath her, as though in collapsing she let the heat of her body break on the floor and seep into the foundations of the room. She stands without speaking, without humming a note. A pitch hovers above her head in defiance of her reticence. She knows the way, of course, to the crimson room. She senses a figure beyond the door, sitting tall in the softest chair, watching carefully the whispers of the fabric of the room.

elle est surtout
aimee

She wants to scream, Au secours, au secours! but worries that her voice might echo in the dimness. Holding two fingers to her bottom lip, she suddenly tips sideways. Her cheek meets the gritty taste of stone, and she knows she cannot stand. The sun should set, she imagines, but it lingers. The sideways explosions of pink and orange contaminate their gray frame. Her eyelids flicker. Her pupils douse the fiery green that surrounds them.
It is now that she realizes there was always someone there in the crimson room with her. She remembers its padded vacancy, its rustling noises. She remembers the footprints on the floorboards, the splashes in the basin of water. She remembers emptiness, but an emptiness that was not solitude. She compares this day with that, understands her own oblivion. She flickers.

elle se souvient
elle est sur les pierres,
sous les etoiles,
dans
rien.

She squints into the sun, perplexed by the glimmering ideas before her. Tears rise to her chest, but no further. She feels vacuous, as though somewhere behind her lies a shadow that disconnected from her only a few steps ago. Too afraid to turn, however, she continues, allowing the window at the end of the corridor dominate her vision. It pushes the shadows out of her, leaves them in her wake with the rustles of tapestries. She wishes she could look away, wishes she didn't feel so compelled to remain in the light. Wishes her shadows might stay with her, comfort her when the light turns away, remind her of what she is and used to be.

ou est la chambre rouge?
pourquoi est-ce qu'elle ne le trouve pas?

Today bubbles populated the surface of the stone fountain. She stared into them, refreshed to see their glinting foam rather than her own reflection. She tires of staring at her reflection. It has begun to look less like a crystal vision of truth, more like a painted face submerged in water that mutes sound and color. hopes the bubbles remain, and hopes that her light breath will push them into shapes that might help her decide: back to the crimson room? She seems to hover in the doorway.

elle t'adore
elle marche avec le visage
d'une personne comme une nuage

She knows things will never appear simple to her glistening, half-closed eyes. Even the grout between the stones of the fountain stares at her, hiding her own secrets from her. She pours water into champagne glasses, drinks it like wassail. She hums to herself and looks toward bright colors that hurt her while they bandage.

elle ne veut pas nager
elle veut danser encore

elle.

She huddles next to the stone fountain. She hides from the open door that slowly searches for her green, staring eyes. The red glow from the sofa that would embrace her and tuck her into its cushions forever shines over the floor. She presses her knees into her eyes so that the glow no longer exists. Her hair, once gathered into a single spurting mass on the back of her head, loosens. Pins dangle onto her shoulders. She hates that her dance was so sad inside of her; she hates that her pricked finger falters even while it traces the path to a mountain in the distance, where her music will pour out of her and into the clear, polished glasses. She will drink it with total abandon when she arrives.

elle n'est rien
elle ne sent rien
les verres sont sage, sont beau
mais ils refletent
les etoiles.

She sat behind the plastic chairs to read. She lost her mind in the criss-crossing grass, and now she wonders where to turn. Back to the crimson room? Back to the stone fountain, still staring at her with blank papers floating on its surface? To a new place altogether?

elle sait.
elle pleure avec les nuages
qui adoraient les etoiles.

She runs. She runs with her arms flung to either side, as fast as she can move. She knows she has to go back to the crimson room. Eventually. But now, she has a day to think of what she'll say to the tapestries when they stare at her. In such green-eyed, exploding honesty they will accost her. They will slide closer to her, beg her to reweave the tassels that are fraying, and she will try her hardest. She doesn't understand why things seem so different in the darkness.

qu'est-ce qu'elle a fait?

Her fingers still tremble as though caught in constant wind. The crimson room rotates around her as she drifts into sleep. Her stomach rises and sinks like newly disturbed waters in the stone basin. She wonders if she can still remember the pieces of that hidden room.

je crois que je tombe
avec toi
les pierres
parlent.

She feels the sudden rush of wind. Though gentle, it seems to cover every inch of her skin, as though the barrier of clothing is of no consequence. Her eyes dart over the pages in the wooden box. Its corners rest in her lap, pressing against skin that still glows from her venture into the crimson room. She leaves to sing, to launch her spinning voice over the highest windowpane. She will not let go of the box.

elle chante a quelque chose
etrange.

She falters, unsure of whether she stands at the head of a staircase or simply inches from cold stone wall. Her eyes are closed, the way they've stayed since the tapestries all fell to the floor. She waits for the wind, for it will blow her forward into whatever lies beyond her burning eyelids.

elle ne te connait pas
elle ne se connait pas
souvenez la fille
souvenez les yeux et les images des etoiles