She asked for this, and Coella isn’t going to cry about it. She’s too old. She has a job to do. She’s not going to cry about it. She’s too young. She has a job to do.
That being said, it’s a good day to be banished to the moon.
story
Your name is Coella Abel. Your parents wanted you to be rich, but you’ve met a middle ground, in a way. You can be who you really are, Coella Lusine, and you can make enough money to shut their mouths by waving a few piping bags around.
(At least, that's how they see it— something as simple as that. They don’t know a thing about deadlines, toothaches, or the way every flickering shadow coming from the oven looks like your grandmother; your grandfamily; in the dark night)
Your name is Coella Lusine, and you say you don’t really want anything.
But there is this locket you keep with you with your grandmother’s face in it. And there are millions of smiles from faces that have been buried that are imprinted into your brain until the day you’re buried too. It’s love— that’s what you want. Any kind of it, pathetic as it sounds.
But you’ll never tell anyone, because adults don't get everything they want; that’s just not how the world works. (And you don’t have anyone holding your hands, so you should just grow up and give up on it. Just do your job; want for nothing, or say you don’t want anything until you believe it.)
…
Missing people this much is normal, isn’t it?
It’s a hard kind of grief. Not moving for days is a hard kind of grief. Keeping yourself so far away from your peers is normal grief. Hating your heart is normal grief. Hating the brain that keeps your memories is normal grief. Hating the entire deal of being an adult is normal. Hating your parents is normal. (Not learning to let go— that’s… that’s not normal, but you don’t know what will happen if you let people know that your grief is anything but normal.)
These wounds have never healed. The hands of time just keep ripping them open again, again, and again. Your mother smiles from across the dinner table and says, “It’s a good thing you, Coella Lusine, are normal and unbothered, because those people were going to die anyway. God was going to take them anyway.”
…
Her body looked cold there, in the casket. You thought you had gotten used to the sight, but there’s a fragile thing between your ribs that bleeds. The thing twists, and cries, and you cry too even when your father whispers that such open vulnerability was unseemly for your age.
When you walk up to her, the thought only pulses in your head louder: she’s cold, she’s cold, she’s cold.
Lusine Abel was your sunlight, but now she’s as pale as the moon, and you want to reach out and touch her to see if she’s as cold as she looks.
But someone— your father, maybe— someone pushes his elbow into your back and tells you that you had to move over so the next person could view her. (You wished you stayed for longer, because it would be the last time you’d get to see her in the light; you should have touched her, or stayed, or both.) But you just walked off, face slack with shock at how easily your moment was pushed over for another’s.
…
A dress flutters by the door, and your mother could have been beautiful, but the dying light just makes the shadows on her face sharper. Her hair is pulled into a tight bun, stripped of the pink that you colored into your own. Looking down at her mother, your own mother didn't shed a single tear. She took her cross necklace in her hands, holding it in front of you as you knelt by the bedside.
She was about to ruin your life.
“God needed her more.”
Did your mother ever understand how deeply those words cut your heart?
Just what could your grandmother— and all the others you lost— give to him that his angels could not? Was it love? He had enough of that already; from your mother, from your father, from so many others— he once had it from you, too. Oh God, you want to scream. Is it so horrible of me to ask for one person who could love me the way they love you?
You turned your eyes down to the body in the bedside and choked on your tears. “Don’t tell me she’s in a better place — she belongs here with me.”
tats
“Heartbroken eighteen year olds... just grow into heartbroken twenty-four year olds.”
“But those are the kinds of twenty-four year olds people stop looking after.
“They just... grow up. And then they run off to space to avoid the things on Earth that reminds them of why their heart broke to begin with.”
“They're very easy to read though.”
“... So other strangers can probably find the pieces after a week or two.”
