To Rebuild Catastrophe

“I can’t have this end,” She thought to herself as she stared out into the red desert, mountains casting shadows she could not see.

She craved them.

The scratchy quilt around her shoulders reminded her of a summer ten years ago, when she was thirteen. The world had been catastrophic then. She felt earthquakes that had not yet occurred and felt the wetness of rainstorms that had not yet been released from the clouds. She felt what had not yet manifested inside of her, a sweet longing tugging at the seams that connected the joints of her bones to one another.

Had experience taken catastrophe away from her? What was there to do when the cycle of heartbreak and fear and love and lust ran after one another like vultures chasing after remains that had long since lost the freshness of free flowing blood.

Vultures are not hunters. They do not stalk their prey. They prefer it limp, bones disconnected, limbs cracked.

She had been the first to shatter the catastrophe. The quilt had been rough underneath her bare body as the fireplace crackled over her shallow breaths as her family slept peacefully in other rooms, a book set aside, spine upward. Her first, mild, earthquake.

She shrugged the blanket off her shoulders, letting it fall around her ankles as she craned her neck longingly toward the shadowed mountains. The second had been an extension of her own damage, no longer a mere shatter but an uneven break. She lay there as if watching her own reckoning, undisturbed as a large jagged edge drifted into the hands of another. They clutched too hard as it dug into their palm, contaminating it with their own blood. It had been her, after all, who had shattered it in the first place.

She had returned to remember a time where she had felt whole, where she had not yet been rid of the warm blooded tendency to feel simply alive. She’d never forgotten the lake that Sammantha discovered when they were thirteen down the dirt path behind the cabin. Her knobby knees had hit a tree branch as she dipped her skinny ankles inside. It was right before the start of her catastrophe, the very beginning of it all inside that lake. Her lips felt soft against Sammantha’s, and the water cool around her legs as she breathed in the smell of pine and coconut. They never spoke about it again.

Now, she wanted to renew herself. She felt no more enticing than a carcass to a pack of vultures. The desire to feel catastrophic, as if her body had the ability to explode at any moment, was so strong it rattled her. How was she to mend the limpness that had overcome her being? She felt it itching under her skin, as if her body was waiting for something to make it whole again. For the freshness to return, but she did not know how.

She wrapped the quilt around her bare skin once more and reached for the door. This was her final try. She yearned for the comfort of the shadowed mountains, but instead turned her back onto them and made her way down to the lake.

As she walked, she felt a warm rush flow through her that she assumed had long since disappeared. She felt the the blood in her legs grow warm, as if it were finally hers again. She walked faster as she spotted moonlight touching water, keeping herself steady as to not feel hopeful. Not yet.

She could not know it was right until she saw it. She stopped suddenly, looking between a row of pine ridden branches with an anticipation she did not know she was capable of. She saw a figure standing, wading in the water, completely still.

She could smell the coconut.