the great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
He’d never been the kind of boy who paid much attention to trees and rocks and pretty things, who appreciated the stillness. His favorite paintings are all of the sea, of wild waves thrashing and the light shining through their crests like a stained-glass window, or if not that than of harbors with their masts and sails like trunks and clouds. August is too fond of the Scarab and Denocte’s eternal midnights, of having options innumerous, whether in music or drink or partners. So whole and simple is his love for it that it’s easy, sometimes, to forget the other side -
how he hates the quiet, when it lingers long enough that his thoughts start to crawl inward. How those moments are the only ones where he can’t seem to see the path forward, like the only path he can’t cut his way through is the thicket of his mind. Better (he has found) to ignore it, to let it grow wild and weedy, and cultivate instead the rest of his life.
A thing easier done when his sleep is dreamless; hence the mushrooms, hence the witch.
Anyway -
August, too, is thinking of the island. Every time a bird sings and the notes are only nature and not music, every time he catches the eye of something watching him and it is not a glint of emerald or garnet, every time the wind moves in the branches and he looks up half-expecting to find a distorted face staring back at him, carved from warped bark with a rotted hollow mouth, his breath feels looser in his lungs.
Until the gold of the day converges to a single vibrant point. As if all the wealth of the grasses and trees has been melted down like idols to make her. Then his heart tightens up, five fingers to a fist, and he thinks I was worried you were dead. There again, those island-thoughts, and he doesn’t even see the butterfly.
But he doesn’t look tense, or out of place, or like he’s surprised at all to see her far from what he imagines her haunts to be. He only ambles up to her, wearing a smile and a sack of fungus, and the leaves shiver down with each breeze (like butterflies) and pretending anything is normal feels impossible.
To her remark he sighs, long-suffering, though a grin is quick to follow. “I agree entirely - I’m never at my best advantage. You should see me in civilized society.” August doesn’t hide the way his gaze skirts over her then, like he’s checking for injury or proof of realness or a sign of why she’s here, in bumfuck nowhere, and not in the desert or in a city or somewhere being properly admired.
Then he steps nearer, all nonchalant, nearly brushing his shoulder against his as he turns to study the birches for a burnt-looking knob of black. When he sees the butterfly his heart stutters.
“Were you there at the end, with the relic?” he asks, still all nonchalance. “I thought I was going to die.” He’s still smiling (strange and soft and honest) when he says it, and it turns mischievous when he looks back down at her, those sky-blue eyes, the sharp features signed by a knife. “I would have had some regrets.”
