doctornoun
He moves like the tide, steady, the push and pull of water on sand. His heavy breath and soft sounds are the whisper of wind and sea. His waves wash over me, and I'm drowning.
It was a simple suggestion, whispered into an ear, nothing too ridiculous or scandalous or outrageous. The implications it held, however, made it clear that the decision made in regards to that suggestion could very well alter the course of their lives.
The bucket was the only thing that seemed to keep Daniel grounded anymore. He had taken to carrying it around with him, to cradling it in his arms in a dark corner with his lantern out, willing the frightening apparition lurching down the hall to go away. With the Shadow pursuing him and breaking down reality, the bucket helped to soothe him, to give him something real and tangible to focus on. It helped, just a little, to keep his head about him. He murmured softly as he could to it, stroked its smooth tin sides and turned it over in his hands, trying to block out the growling and moaning of the slack-jawed creature that was too stupid to find him huddling in the dark, but too smart to leave the area and let Daniel be in peace.
Blood caked the skin around the wounds like the dry, crumbling mud banks of a raging river. It painted her all over, exaggerating her features with great streaks and fine lines of brilliant red. Her face was crusted in garnet, glimmering gently and ever-changing in the half-light, the small gems weighing down her eyelashes until she could see nothing. It was a mask of rubies that would sparkle and shine and roll away across the pavement for the rest of her eternity.
Soup is the food of loneliness, the sustenance of bachelordom, the canned means to an end, devoid of all passion and pleasure that might otherwise make it a comfort food. It's the one unrelenting presence in the cupboard that ensures I will never go hungry, no matter how depressed or tired or worthless I feel. Particularly worthless-- too worthless to care for myself properly, not even worth the dish soap required to wash more than one pot. One is not a number that is meant to be cooked for, it always ends up in too much food with too few to share with, for food is a social agent, a reason for the bringing together of those most beloved to us. If food is this timeless social element, then soup is the loneliest food there is, because in cans it comes with intent to only serve one.
"It never would have worked out," he said, somewhat apologetic even though he didn't need to be. "We were just two different people; she was always looking forward, and I'm always looking back." Interesting, that he would speak of her in the past tense, as if she was now a relic in the halls of his memory, the past in which he tended to dwell. "That always bothered me," he continued, "because even though she hated me living in the past, how do you know where you're going if you don't know where you came from?"
I can see the fine cracks forming in her impenetrable mask, the fractures in her personality beginning to show. The way her smile seems too bright and wobbles at the edges, loose as though suspended from a broken hinge. The way she is always so eager to please, always trying so hard to be sought after and desired speaks volumes of the mask she's crafted for herself. She doesn't want to be left vulnerable, but doesn't want to be lonesome, so she makes her mask in the image of someone else she thinks is likeable and hides who she really is behind this fractured, splintered second skin. Fault lines form in it when she finds herself unsatisfied in her life, living a life that's not her own because she is afraid to live her life as herself and for herself.
It stood, yawning at her feet, wide and deep and dark, this pit dug into the earth. It was scarred and jagged and rushed, not precisely cut like they would have been Before. It was just long and just wide enough for one body, wrapped in cloth and set beside the pit so carefully, so delicately, even though that body was dead. What would he care, she thought bitterly. It was laid there, covered in a way that didn't cover enough to let her forget even a small detail of the blood and the screams and the rivers welling up from the great pits torn into his skin... the hopelessness in his eyes when he realized what it meant... the bump in the centre of the shroud's forehead that insured he wouldn't revive to bite them as he'd been bitten...
It was surrounded by candles that were never lit in some sort of mockery of what a funeral would have been Before. It felt like some sort of joke, some sort of great punchline in this great comedy and before she could stop herself, laughter bubbled forth from the pit of her stomach and spilled out into the yawning black wet-earth pit. It broke and shattered into sobs and the pieces fell before her, fell with her to her knees in the damp grass. No-one touched her, no one tried to console her, no one would dare, not these days, not since Before, before this sort of thing was common. They moved around her to lower the shrouded body into the pit, and she watched it disappear, inch by mottled red-white inch, into the pit in the earth, to lie at the bottom. Suddenly six feet felt both like catacombs of forever down which she could never ever run, and far too shallow a muddy pit for this.
That's it, that's all I can take. I give up. I am tired of trying. I don't care enough to keep at it anymore. The whole thing was a straw house, and that straw was the last one, it was the one that broke the camel's back, and I am tired of clutching at them desperately. I am tired of trying to find a reason to keep making excuses. I love myself enough to let it go, let it drift away like dry straw released into the wind.
"It's just this big quest, you know?" she whispered, voice low and smooth. She lay spread out on the grass beside him, the pair staring upward into the infinite oblivion of space, at hundreds of thousands of twinkling stars that shone on, heedless of the pair watching them countless miles away on a tiny chunk of rock in a tiny system on a tiny arm of a tiny galaxy that spun and spun and spun without a care into eternity, just like every other infinitesimally small thing on small thing on small thing that made up every dark corner of the vastness of space did, ceaselessly and into eternity. The studded veil of the night sky seemed both impossibly close and incredibly far, warm yet cold, comforting yet forbidding. Her voice was hushed as though afraid to speak in its presence, in the tremendous, unimaginable gift of being here to witness the grandeur of space at night at this particular speck in time, this one singular singularity of being that could be claimed by no one else, witnessed by no one else, experienced by no one else at no other juncture in the entire course of eternity, forward and backward. "Life, it's just this one big quest. We define it and then we run out and reach for it and take it, and it's all we can do. That's all that we have, just here, just now, just our short allotment of time to complete our quest. And that's it." He didn't reply to her, didn't disturb the small spirals of mist from their breaths ascending into the void above, just lay there and felt the universe spin.
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writing since 2011 · 45 entries · 36 days shown up
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