AND YOU WAIT; YOU WAIT FOR THE ONE THING THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE, MAKE IT MORE THAN IT IS. SOMETHING WONDERFUL, EXCEPTIONAL, STONES AWAKENING, DEPTHS OPENING IN YOU. YOU THINK OF LANDS YOU'VE JOURNEYED THROUGH, OF PAINTINGS AND A DRESS ONCE WORN BY A WOMAN YOU NEVER FOUND AGAIN. AND SUDDENLY YOU KNOW: THAT WAS ENOUGH. YOU RISE AND THERE BEFORE YOU IN ALL IT'S LONGINGS AND HESITATIONS IS THE SHAPE OF WHAT YOU LIVED.
It is a bit like a eulogy,
watching the ocean.
His heart is full of something that
is full of tragedy; it feels like saying
goodbye, with each coming and going of the tides.
It is how he gathers his thoughts. How he makes resolutions. By watching his forlorn, former matriarch. It is how he lets his heart bleed, just a bit. To keep him humble. To keep him finite. To keep him mortal.
Orestes walks along the shore alone, searching for sand-dollars. He picks up only the most perfect, as he stands knee-deep in the ebb and flow of the Terminus. His eyes seek out the tumbling disks of white, where they flash for just a moment before they are again devoured. When he sees one through the foamy surf, he reaches for it with trembling telekinesis. Sometimes, he pulls them up in fistfuls of sand and streaming water. Sometimes, he does not grab them at all, but instead feels them slip away like a sigh from a lover’s lips.
His favourites are the smallest ones; the ones that are found accidentally. Smaller than a man’s thumbnail; just a few pieces large then a single grain of sand. They are always a surprise, found suctioned against a shell or other sand dollar. He has just found one the size of a pinkie-nail when he sees the young girl in the distance.
Orestes knows that look, even from a distance. He settles the smallest sand dollar he has ever found back into the tide—he allows it to tumble from him, lost. He stares out after it for a moment, before he moves toward the shore and trots whisper-quiet across the sand. His muscles do not tire. He thinks, briefly, as if through a dream, many days where he had run along the edge of the shore in a different life.
It does not take long for Orestes to approach from behind the young mare. She looks almost sea-kissed, but not quite. “Hello,” he answers. Then: “It is beautiful, isn’t it?”
The words are pained; full of love and something complicated, something dark, not unlike the far-off and hazy horizon. The wind tosses his mane, and at the moment his emotions are so still, so serene (albeit achingly so) that his tattoos do not glow. He is cool dappled gold with silver designs dancing, life-like, across his legs and face. Perhaps it would not be so hard to see him like a setting sun, across the waves. He looks at her, a bit mischievously then. "Would you like a sand dollar? You can use it to buy Her love." And he gestures at the ocean with his head, and for a moment the sun at his brow flashes gold.
