To Miraille everything
was interesting. She loved shadows, as they gave character to otherwise shy
objects. She loved light in every shade, shape or form. Even if she knew none
of their names, she would slide though them like a tourist on the first day of
a very crowded spice bazaar. It didn’t matter things were great or small, grave
or gay, well cut or thrown aside or if they were things at all. She liked all
the sounds and all the secrets. Faces, oh, she was in awe of faces. Beastly
eyes, baby lips. The hair. The features. People gave her dirty looks and
hateful glances or they fell in love without ever getting from her more than a
single fleeting moment. A woman, enthralled while flipping through cheap pages
of a gossip magazine. Grand, important men, looking down from election posters.
Mireille loved all the faces. These were all interesting people to her.
It
didn't matter if Mireille was a person or a sprite. Alive or a reflection, it
didn't change the way she saw shapes made. If she was an old soul or an
excellent creature from the future, mattered none the way she stared. She was all
eyes, all senses, she was the brain, the heart behind the skin. To her the
advancing sights were what to other people is iron in their blood, a feeding
life force, and she never stopped moving, never stopped wondering. Even every
pain she felt was curious, complicated. She kept every thing that made her
smile, every thing that made her cry; she called this collection a planet.
Except for a handful of practical items like shoes or a blanket - all of which
she's only ever been given, her only possessions besides her existence, a far
more fleeting thing than one might think, were fragments of her past lives, her
former stories. The shards of her soul. What reason it had to shatter so,
Mireille neither knew nor worried. To her none of them had sharp, cutting
edges, they were just little crumpets on a fair winding path. If history was a
tale on frail stationery, mailed to dusty bespectacled scholars, these shards
were the stamps. Even how she knew these were things that were important to
past Mireilles, didn't matter. She knew. They knew. She carried them around,
adding them to shape a puppet that bore her semblance. A silly, sentimental
thing, perhaps a ticket of courage, some might imagine, abstractly, by the look
of it. But as irony, another grand life stream of the world, would have it,
that rag reyna with a clay face and jewel mouth was more alive than Mireille herself.
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