Information


Echova has a minion!

Minion the Constellation




Echova
Legacy Name: Echova


The Galactic Swampie
Owner: fly

Age: 14 years, 9 months, 1 week

Born: July 30th, 2009

Adopted: 14 years, 9 months, 1 week ago (Legacy)

Adopted: July 30th, 2009 (Legacy)


Pet Spotlight Winner
March 26th, 2012

Statistics


  • Level: 13
     
  • Strength: 32
     
  • Defense: 32
     
  • Speed: 27
     
  • Health: 27
     
  • HP: 27/27
     
  • Intelligence: 35
     
  • Books Read: 35
  • Food Eaten: 0
  • Job: Certified Art Framer



Echova
ek-oh-vuh


Change
Remember me as I was then;
Turn from me now, but always see
The laughing shadowy girl who stood
At midnight by the flowering tree,
With eyes that love had made as bright
As the trembling stars of the summer night.
Turn from me now, but always hear
The muted laughter in the dew
Of that one year of youth we had,
The only youth we ever knew.
Turn from me now, or you will see
What other years have done to me.
Sara Teasdale


Art
PiranhaPettingZoo -- x


What I am looking for is not something easily explained in words. I could tell you that I'm looking for myself, who I am underneath all these layers of skin and bones, but that implies that I've been lost; I haven't. I knew where I was every step of this journey, I knew what I was doing. I suppose the most appropriate thing to say is that I am looking for a way back.

I know the straightforward way. I could just retrace my steps, walk back down those cracked streets, past overgrown public gardens and through the doorways I brushed with my fingertips. I could find the way back to the site of what I'm looking for, where it happened - but what I want back isn't a place. Its not a house full of vintage photographs of people I never knew, its not the bed where I slept as a child or the rose bushes out back where I used to hide.

What I want is a way back to that state of mind. I want a way back to who I was before I stepped out the door, before I left everything behind.

--

To me, childhood was a place full of sunlight. All different colours and texture of sunlight - light like butter, like honey, light the colour of lemon slices. Like the colour of dusky peach skins, of watermelon, of any number of roses. Light through leaves, through dust, through sheets and blankets, through closed eyes and clouds. I was mesmerized by clouds. I would lay in the garden, under my mother's rose bush, and stare at the sky for hours. It wasn't that I was looking for shapes I could recognize in them, I just wanted to look at their different shades of grey, at how a sunset might gilt the bottoms of them and turn them into piles of spun sugar. I suppose I was in love with colour, with the way rain smelled and how flower petals felt between my fingers. I had no interested in playing with other children, in making up imaginary friends - being left alone in the garden was all I wanted.

In my teen years I turned to darker things, but not for the reasons my mother thought. It was simply that I found another spectrum of light - moonlight. I had dressed myself in soft earth colours when I was smaller because I thought it might trick animals into believing I was a plant, if I held still enough. I started wearing black and for the first time I was proud of my pale skin. I took to sneaking out, not to drink or see boys the way my friends did, but to look at the sky. I would climb the tallest tree I could find and stare at the sky for hours, arranging stars into patterns and observing how night clouds moved. There was also a certain magic to the night that I was not immune to, and I took to wandering the streets. What looked dirty and repulsive during the way took a new look in the moonlight, like I'd found a second world right under the skin of the first one.

I padded through streets strewn with broken glass that caught the light and looked like a blanket of fallen stars on the wet pavement. I grew thin because then it felt like the night wind could blow right through me, like I was a ghost. It also made me feel different, disconnected from my body; sometimes it felt like my mind was floating a few feet above my body, manipulating it like a puppet. I do not remember being unhappy, but everyone I speak to about that time tells me I looked haunted. I was a stick-thin child with dark circles under her eyes that made friends with people no one else spoke to. My mother had given up on keeping me inside and simply tried to get me to eat, to speak to her, but I was preoccupied with planning my next escapade. I wrote stories in my head and collected animal bones that I turned into jewelry. The bones stank and eventually decayed, but I wore them anyway.

--

I had a friend, a boy I met when I was on the streets. He wore his hair long, down in his face like a curtain of rough dark curls and his eyes were always hidden. We met when I saw him playing his flute on a street corner late at night; his hands looked like beautiful brown birds. He had a lithe, tan body and soft-looking lips that were kissing the silver of his instrument. When he was done I sat by him, and we began to talk. We spoke all night, about where we came from and who we were beneath our skin, under all the layers of posturing and self-protection. He made me jewelry, rings like resting silver butterflies, a necklace of broken glass and wire and bits he'd picked up off the street; he also made me a hairnet. It sounds stupid to call it that, but I don't know what else to say it was: it was a beautiful silver net with small crystalline beads and when he hung it over my wild black hair it looked like there were stars hanging in it. He wrote me poetry and spoke softly to me. In the two weeks that we knew each other, I think I loved harder and stronger than any other time in my life.

However, I made a mistake. While he was writing for me, sweating over silversmithing tools for me and gently finger-combing the knots out of my hair, I brought him nothing. That in and of itself was no great issue, for he wanted very little. But I see now that it was a mistake to take his offerings and give nothing back. It was like he spent each day professing his love for me, and at the end of the day I would simply walk away, without answering. I don't think it would have bothered him, but I broke the only rule: I wasn't allowed to look at his face. I could see his lips and chin, the line of his jaw, but it was forbidden to brush aside his hair. And yet that was what I did, one night, thinking that we were so close that nothing would be denied me. I was wrong.

I never did quite understand why he hid himself, but on that night I learned that he was beautiful. The sort of beauty he had was not something easily rendered in words, but it drew the breath from my lungs and I simply stared. His eyes I remember vividly, all smoky grey and green, a fleck of yellow. What man has those eyes? He pushed away and left me on the corner, wearing all the things he made me, bejeweled like a queen, while he vanished. I wept for a week, turning the anger inwards; I kept everything he ever made me. But I never saw him again.

--

At the end of my teen years I met another man. I was sitting in an all-night coffee shop, my hair knotted and pulled back into a wild ponytail. I was wearing all black and a necklace made of bird bones; I hadn't slept in two days. When he came in, bells should have tolled. Lightning should have flashed or something. The world should have warned me. Instead, he smiled. His mouth was full of sharp teeth and his eyes were oddest red I had ever seen. With his little espresso cup he came and sat next to me, pulling up a chair from another table; he didn't even ask. We sat in silence, staring at each other - he was still smiling that vicious grin. I stared back at him, a ghost in black that wasn't about to be intimidated by some guy, no matter how dangerously attractive he was. He sat there for half an hour, just smiling at me until he knocked back his cold espresso, winked at me, and left. I went into the bathroom and shook for a good fifteen minutes; whatever that guy was, it wasn't something I had ever seen before. He felt fearless, beautiful, terrifying and intense. I stroked the bird bone necklace and went home.

I didn't see him again for another month, but when I did it was just like the first time, except he spoke. He said 'hey' and I stared at him. He grinned. He invited me to go with him and his sharp-toothed friends to a show, some band they said was amazing. I shrugged, and that was it. We hardly left each other's sides for the next two years. I was happy, in an obsessive sort of way, but I nearly died three times. My mother had given up by this point; we went out for waffles once a month, but that was it.

At the end of the second year something changed. He went out without me, didn't sleep or slept for eighteen hours straight, and just seemed to forget I was there. I felt even more like a ghost than I ever had and when he could only pay attention to me long enough to spit at me, I realized I had overstayed my welcome. I packed my things and left with no warning. When I stepped into the street I was blinded by the sunlight, and the last two years were clearly illuminated before me: I had lost a mother, whatever friends I had and spent every hour of each day in a twilight-world. I had kept myself and our relationship in a dark place, so I could never quite see what it was, because I knew what it was. It was rotten. I grinned wolfishly at myself in a store window and felt sick to my stomach: had I always had teeth this sharp? Did I always look this feral?

--

Its hard to explain why I stayed with him for as long as I did. Maybe I liked the danger, that feeling that at any moment my existence could be over. Or maybe I had created a whole fairytale world for myself. I had started out a golden child, a perfect daughter to a frighteningly beautiful mother, and then the needle pricked: I changed. It wasn't that I fell asleep, that I've been wandering around all this time with my soul slumbering inside me. It was more like a certain bit of me took a step back, and another replaced it. This new piece didn't want sunlight, clouds or rose petals. It wanted grit and shadows, razorblades and ropes. It wanted a dark sort of purification; distillation through suffering. In the end I believed that I could make myself a better person through enduring enough pain.

So, he was the one for me.

--

I didn't know the city anymore. Any magic it had to me in youth was gone, so I took the few things I owned and drove off in my mother's old car. I am not proud of the years that followed that, of the men I knew and the things I did. Earlier I said that I had known what I was doing, where I was going; that is a lie. I had no idea what the world was or how I fit into it. I had gone from an earth-loving child to a night-loving girl, and on to a young woman who got caught up in the dark fairytales she imagined took place in the ugly parts of the city. I had slowly edged myself into a fictional world.

To atone for those last five years, at the age of twenty four I settled in a small town and got a job editing their newspaper. At twenty seven I realized once again that I had let myself slip out of reality, into a sort of limbo where I was neither atoning nor moving forward. I went to work, worked, went home and went to sleep. There was really nothing for me there, no lover, no home. I lived there, but it was not my home. The sunlight was always the same colour, harsh and dirty yellow. If I looked at it too long it felt like it was burning me from the inside out. Maybe it was just the guilt, but I couldn't stay. I left the little town and their newspaper. I ditched my mother's old car at the side of the road: I'd had an idea. When I was little we had gone hiking in the woods and I had spied a little shack up on a rocky hillside. For some reason I knew I had to go there. I didn't really know the way, but once I was out in the forest I felt myself calming. I followed a trail of blue jays until I found the hut, still perched on its hill. I knocked on the door; no one answered. It was unlocked, so I went in. From the dust it was clear that no one had lived here for a good few years, but no animals had gotten in and the place was structurally sound.

Over the next few weeks I set about cleaning it thoroughly and by the end it was a cozy little place. There were bundles of herbs hanging from the rafters on the ceiling, though they were too old to use for seasoning. There was a collection of small glass bottles set on the windowsills, casting different coloured rays of light across the room. The furniture was old wood and the blankets were all patchwork quilts, but it was warm. The fireplace was lined with tiles and there was a little stove; I had quickly found the independent generator the place ran on. There was a little town nearby where I bought food with the money I had saved up and bought books of poetry and philosophy. I felt like I wasn't just cleaning up that old house, I was cleaning myself. I ate well, mostly fresh fruit and vegetables in any manner of recipe. I drank tea and read poetry to the birds that nested in the eaves.

Being separate from other people does something to the way a person thinks. It wasn't that I was lonely, though I was. I wasn't lonely in the usual way: it didn't make me want to search for people to be with. In fact, each time I came back from visiting the town it was a relief to be alone. But there was something missing.

--

I had come so far, leaving so much wreckage behind me. Even I do not like to remember all the things I have done, the people I have hurt and all the little mistakes. My mother had never done anything but love me, though she did not know how to control me. I don't know what I would have done differently, if I had the chance to do everything again: I'm not even sure where everything went wrong. It must have been a gradual progression, but it felt like I turned against myself in the blink of an eye. Maybe that it something that happens to everyone, but I don't think so.

There is no redemption in sitting on a hill eating fruit and cleaning your brain with sharp-witted poetry. I could have stayed up there the rest of my life and never changed. But the character's in fairytales are never allowed to simply wallow forever.

--

My mother died. I don't know if I ever would have found out if an old friend of hers hadn't come through the town below my hut. We met in the supermarket, in front of the broccoli, and she recognized me; for a moment it looked like she would cry. You look so much like your mother, she said. And I said, oh. She told me my mother had died of some disease I had never even heard of; the funeral was a month ago. In one last attempt to help me, she had left me her house. But I wasn't ready to go back there yet. I knew I couldn't go back the way I came, because that path obviously had its faults. I went back up to my hut and fell into a depression, culminating in my sleeping for almost days at a time. On the seventh day, I had a dream about the boy I knew when I was young, with his curls and his flute. He took a feather from a crow, dipped it in the golden eye of a cat, and drew stars across my back. When I awoke, I knew a way back home.

I went back down to the town and into the only tattoo parlor for miles. I told the gruff man behind the counter what I wanted, and he raised his eyebrows but said he'd do it. It took several sessions to be fully done, but by the end I had a star map tattooed across by body. It began on my left hand, at the moment of my birth, and then the map unfolded across my arms, chest, belly, hips, thighs, knees, calves, throat and back. The map ended on the left side of my back, right behind my heart. I felt now that even if I drove the same roads back, I was following a new map, my own map; there was no way I could go wrong.

And so I hitch hiked back to the town where I was born, miraculously intact; I thanked the map for that. And when I stood on the shady stone steps of my mother's house, I was surprised that it looked so small. No more than a cottage, really. Someone had been keeping the garden up and the inside of the house was exactly as I remembered, all clean and cool and beautiful. Everything felt touched with a bit of magic. I slept in my mother's bed that night, under her eggshell coloured sheets and the old lace coverlet. In the morning, I awoke with light the colour of amber gently caressing my cheek, as the sun rose through her rich brown curtains. Something inside of me broke then, or was healed or came into existence or died. I don't know. I felt something shift, and suddenly I was ravenous. I carefully went through my mother's vintage dresses, brushed my hair and put the silver net of stars on. I walked down to a restaurant I had never seen before, and sat at the counter. I ordered a soup full of chickpeas and lentils; it was so delicious I sent my regards to whoever had made it. The man behind the counter smirked and yelled that back to someone I couldn't see. I stood up to leave and as I turned away, I caught sight of dark curls out of the corner of my eye. Dark curls, and smoky eyes with yes, a little yellow in them. He smiled.

"Hey, Eva. Welcome back."

--

Profile by the amazing Revel

Pet Treasure


Dark Shaman Bone Necklace

Lunar Maille Headdress

Dream Journal

Pet Friends