I Thiiiink This Is A Wrap From Me Unless You Have Anything To Add That Extends It - Blog Posts
dacey nodded her head. one step each day. it was good advice in theory, if not for the fact that it felt like she was descending a steep set of stairs in the dark. if any of those one steps was on uneasy footing, she would go plummeting to the bottom. even when her feet found the ground, merely trying to find it made her stomach feel like it was trying to leap out of her throat. she had no idea if there was an end to the descent, but there had to be. seffora had similarly had to navigate her own darkened staircase, and now was starting to speak of the light at the end of it. perhaps, with time and patience, dacey could arrive there too.
she stayed quiet when seffora hugged her, her own arms coming up to hold her friend tight. she did not know if seffora knew how grateful she was for her support in that moment. though dacey had shared only a fraction of her worries, she felt lighter, unburdened in some ways. she made a mental note to send seffora a token of that appreciation before they returned to their respective lands once more.
"then you must be serious," the ghost-smile on her lips turned into something more genuine. dacey's melancholy had a permanent presence in her, but there were occasions where she could put it to the side, and this was one of them. "but you did not come all the way to the west to listen to my complaints. let's talk of happier things while we have time to spend together."
Seffora continued to hold her friend's hand, both grateful and saddened by this intimate space of trust and vulnerability the two shared. She never wished to see a loved one struggling, of course, but she also understood that sometimes it were the moments of an aching heart that brought people closer together. “One step each day,” she said to the princess. Some days it would be a step forward and some days it would feel like a step backward. And it was alright that it was so. Grief and heartache were not linear processes, she'd learned.
There was undoubtedly a warm, physical nature to Seffora in how she reached to hold hands or touch shoulders. For her most dear ones she couldn't help but wish to offer an embrace, and so she moved closer to Dacey to give her a hug.
“You can disagree,” Seffora chuckled then, her expression still soft, though with some more gladness in her eyes now “But know I will stubbornly insist upon it. It's the only thing I'm willing to contradict a princess about,” she half-joked. It was the beautiful thing about friends, she supposed, that she could see something in Dacey that the princess did not see in her herself, and vice versa. She experienced this with the Northern princess, and with Laena too —the subtle and tender ways in which they lifted each other up, trying to make the other see and recognize what others might have instilled into them to be blind to. It was the way in which girls —women— could do more than just survive in this world, but actually learn to thrive.