c e y l o n
T
he way the world works, it seems, is that there is always someone to watch, to come a-calling, and to settle into the same space and breathe the same air as another. Pack animals. Plaintive. Small. In need of help, protection. In some way, incomplete, begging for another to make them whole. Ceylon knows, as he knows a great deal of things, that he is not lonely. This affliction of the mind has never so much as darkened his doorstep, nor begged entrance into the coveted corner of the world he greedily calls his own. Oh it would try, someday, perhaps, but today he is content in his own company, at ease with the bubbling brooks that wash away even the worse crimes every stone bleeds into its waters. The Rapax is a cruel and demanding mistress, and Ceylon longs to know her secrets and possess her skills for a fraction of the time it takes her.
He does not. Of course he does not.
She is a giant, and he mere mortal made into something less human than the next.
A question posed, unblinking eyes seem pensive, darkened, as he chews it over. Although brows pull down, his golden lips never flinch from their tight line. At last, at last he seems to breathe and with it take all the oxygen of the world. On an exhale, Ceylon simply shrugs. ”Things are clearer that way,” as though that is all the explanation necessary for being alone and wanting it that way.
Things are clearer. The press of bodies does not distract from the works of a mental giant. He can stand upon the spines of books, not men, and exist in harmony with himself. Does that make him a monster, does that make him strange, for pushing away the company of another in favor of his own? Perhaps he is simply egotistic.
What he is and is not matters little to Ceylon. Not when these megaliths of flesh and bone stand before him, instead asking for him to accompany them as some instrument would another’s song.
If he is an instrument, then he is gentle and he is stringed. Plucked cords on his skin and on his mind pull him another step closer to the duo, sizing up Damascus with little more than a scientist’s interest in some new bacteria, a painter’s fresh brush. A nod. Barely a rustling of his hair, golden and playful with the breeze, wrathful when upset. ”Where is it you go?” And he does not decline, he does not say no, closing his doors as some great oaken door slamming shut as a mournful tolling of the funeral bells. Because knowledge of places keeps him grounded, keeps him sane.
Without a map, a path to walk down when he is still in the night, Ceylon is as wretched as his father, as gluttonous as him, too.
—
and when the time comes that i am reduced to fragile bones,
know that my soul will always search
and when the time comes that i am reduced to fragile bones,
know that my soul will always search
