This has been sitting in my drafts for months, haha. Thought I should finally just post it and stop tweaking. Feedback appreciated!

——— • ——— • ———

We were happy.

High enough to touch the clouds, fingers pulling through soft wisps, dragging through the endless swathes of pink.

You kissed a heartbeat into me. You kissed words onto my tongue.

The sun peaked overhead as your skin shone a cool, bright gold. I remember trying to find a synonym for beauty. I realized I’d used them all up.

Then I realized that nothing would be enough. There is no clever turn of phrase that describes she who glows by day and by night, the creature that laughs so swiftly and speaks so softly that it is envied by the wind.

We were there, dancing on the edge of everything, towering high enough to feel like birds.

I pried your trembling hands apart and held them to my heart.

“Don’t fall,” I cautioned. I’m sure you could feel my heart rabbiting under your fingertips.

“What happens if I do?”

My hands came to rest like warm stones behind your shoulders.

“You lose your Grace. Your… you-ness. The thing that makes you distinguishable from trees, from the sky, from me.”

“… from you?”

The clouds drew close to us, blushing shades of apricot and honeycomb, as I spoke of other things, and you answered.

——

You must have had some notion planted in you by the moon as we slept, for the following morning, you were too quiet.

“What is it?”

There was a kind of earnestness written on your brow, and near your eyes. A puzzling out, a searching, a sifting.

“Am I real?”

Reflexively, I reached out to touch your arm. The question alarmed me. It was like someone had taken the cool, eggshell sky and splattered a streak of red paint across it.

It was wrong, the way that asking the clouds why they cried was wrong. It shook the implicitly known order of things.

“My Grace. Your… Grace. Do we know if that even exists? What if it’s a lie?”

The world went a hard, bony white, like I’d taken a punch to the head.

All I remember is your sun limned hands reaching, reaching for me as I staggered as though dazzled by the presence of a god.

“You… We…” I paused to clear my throat. “You’re thinking about jumping, aren’t you?”

You smiled through parted lips, but I could tell that the expression was a lie.

“We’ve been here too long,” you whispered. “Come dance with me.”

I could not stop watching. I could not stop holding your hands as you walked backwards. I felt the wind scrape salt from my cheeks.

“Don’t you want to?” Your question dropped down my throat and into my stomach like a stone.

No, I didn’t say. No, I don’t want to fall. With or without you. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to lose our high, sunny slice of paradise.

“Come,” you said, tipping backwards.

I didn’t even have time or breath to call out your name. Not even one last time.

——

I watched us falling as if in fragments, a stuttering roll of film. Your aura dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened. You were burning. I was burning.

The Grace was being burned out of us.

——

I didn’t register the impact.

I don’t remember the cry of anguish that must have torn itself from my chest. There you lay, broken at nearly every joint. Your skin was dull, your blood no longer silk blue but an angry red.

That was how it happened, darling.

That was how we became human.