TRICK MIRRORS :

[incipher]

I should never have stopped running.

The wind is a color wheel that you feel, that the body knows. The wind is my compass, my guide, my only companion - needless it is to say, I follow where the wind flows, chase after those colors like a blind man in the brightest shade of dark. For those who know me used to say I was blind, and the few who remain (one, maybe two now) still do, probably, because it is the truest of truths. Blind, indeed, but not by rage or grief. My cataracts were septic conclusions of indifference, the disease they said that is stronger than hate. And I used to be an unfettered child, but a child born to ten hundred burdens; I used to be a spirited child, but a child cramped in a seashell of horrors and impossible travesties. Then, I can't really explain it: was it the storm and the surrounding sea swelling three, no four, times its natural size, and consuming the kingdom at its shores? Or was it the pauper prince and his peasant wife abandoning their children in strange winds, never to return, that turned me this way, that blinded me? Honestly, I cannot say. I do not care to and would not even if I did know - I am a fettered and spiritless creature who drifts from one slope to the next knoll, sunrise to moon set, and it has never bothered me before. The wind is a constant that dwindles, fades and pretends to die completely, but I can be promised a rise when I just close my eyes and wait, and feel. I know the wind. I know its colors and I thrive off them. The endlessness. I run with the wind. I run.

I ran.

I made one stop when the wind, it faltered. It fell, and I guess now, I have fallen, too. The silent night is a cascade of timelessness that holds within it, nothing, not even a rustle of leaves. And the conifers here are tall and gargantuan, but their voiceless features convey a similarity to stone; a feeling of coldness that has rooted deep, if not deeper still, within the hollow. I, I shivered and, wide-open-eyed, saw for the first time with new sight, absent of those indifferent cataracts. I saw, and what I saw made something new register within, catalyzed a stirring that made my flesh quake with heat and a rush of blood to the head. I couldn't place it in the beginning, but the longer I walked (couldn't run anymore if I tried) it grew, a sick weight in the pit of my stomach, shackles at my ankles. It grew and grew, until I couldn't swallow and my tongue felt swollen; and my legs turned to lead while my eyelids were on fire. The picture of colors at night blurred into a navy mist, a collection of firing synapses and neurons snipping memories from the patchwork of bushes and throng of trees, all of it shadowed - and the moon barely peeping through the canopies, pale inklings of illuminating white light crystallizing the forest floor.

I think the feeling is called fatigue.

The morning after, I wake in a strange setting. The noiselessness evaporated some time in the night, perhaps when the first light of dawn shined through the branches, catching dew on the leaves and igniting the world with tones of daybreak. Now there was a cacophony of sounds: songbirds, which I had never stopped to listen to before, warbling folk tunes and other, softer melodies, sweeter harmonies; the ghosts of their songs fluttered in an echo of wings, for the bite of cold clung to the air and it was then that I took notice. The wind, where is the wind? It is still here, it is thick here. The trees go close and their roots are old, ancient drinkers of the earth. I can see the sky through perforations in the viridian, the hues of orange and yellow, and burning red; there are so many colors, too many colors, and I don't know them at all. My body feels weird settled here in the dirt and moss, and I rise as the sun rises, to its zenith; at the pinnacle, I am as I have been for hours - motionless and, again I cannot name it, something more. Something significant, I think, yet this world is beyond me, is wrong for me. Where the wind does not flow I cannot hope to run from, or to, and it is the first time in a long time that I have felt the entirety of what it means to be me, Sabriel Sasaki. For I am a blind man desperate for brightness. I was a blind man desperate for many things. And now, I have lost the wind. And now, I have stopped running. I do not know how to start again.

*complete: claiming + for attybum.

[ATTY]

Sunlight – it set my world ablaze, scorched my paper skin and burned my eyes.

Even through the tightest seal, it seared through hazelnut eyelids and warmed the inside of me to the point where I felt ill. Perhaps like daddy would have done, I shrank away, wriggling along the earth like a gossamer caterpillar to sprawl deeper beneath the conifers, leaving an earthen wake. Maybe that’s why the sun unnerved me, made me felt like we’d never been close – because daddy hated it, and out of habit I’d moved where he had moved. He’d told me once he’d learned from a skullman who controlled the shadows, and from him he had learned how to blend, to fit neatly into the blackness like a nothingness that completed. But I had never played the chameleon in the dark, and I had never had the ability to stitch myself into the macabre backdrop like daddy had.

But still, I’d grown to love it and the cold that was always with it. The ice that edged the puddles near me was the same that lined my heart, that had me always feeling imperceptibly cold and numbed to the world and its heat and drama. And it was in this disconnection with the rest of humanity where I revelled, so as the shade seeped into my skin and drew it tight across me with the faintest autumn breeze, I was suddenly unfurling into existing. The pine needles tickled the space between my ears, and they littered my silver curls like loose pins that should’ve held all that hair back. But I was ignorant of the tickles and the touchings, as I skipped between the wide paths between the trunks, never noticing the way my long tail continued to snag on the rough bark and leave a bread crumb trail of ivory behind me.

I never peeled away from the shadows, they were my friends in the day and my world in the night, and I wouldn’t betray them for the light. I couldn’t hide or dance in secret out there in the brightworld, I would’ve glowed bronze and shone silver-yellow outlines, and in the dark I was dull and bird-boned, built to break and shatter like mummy eventually did. In the dark I was colourless to the eye, and through that they left me be, to flitter on like a cabbage butterfly in a meadow of monarchs.

And in the shadows you couldn’t tell if my eyes were closed or open, if I danced or jogged, hopped or tripped. All of me was blanketed in mystery here, but the blanket slipped off the back of me when I opened my eyes finally as the darkness through my lids grew too bright again. I presumed I’d strayed into the sunspatter spots in the forest, but instead I had danced nose to nose with you, a bird-boned, breakable, shatterable boy who was more lost than I ever had been at heart. And the exhaustion in the expression and the weight of your eyes stood me still, presented to you like a forest nymph, chocolate and white and needle-green, and all I did was stare like daddy always did, with the biggest fire eyes I could manage, soberly contemplating where to next step with my pearly toes.

And then curiosity dipped into my throat, and my tongue softly waved “What happened to you?” Because something about you was wrong, something about you was… “… you’re dead in the eyes…”

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[incipher]

If (and this is a big if) I could promise you anything, would you believe me? It is brilliant here: the painting of autumn against a silhouette of trees, even the very breath breathing through the roots and into (what place else?) my soul, it all resonates with something I lost once. I have been running for so long I forgot how to recognize it, forgot how to remember you (point intention purpose), and while everything was lost in between I can sense it now. It's like being born again. It's like knowing you. It's like you didn't die. And then it's remembering that you did, you are very dead and un-beautiful now, growing worms where your heart ought to be but isn't anymore. It is remembering failure and despair, and the careless handling of anger in my fragile white hands - I do not know why you trusted me when I was always born to fly and now there is this, there is us. There is me and there is a memory of you trapped within, a scalding truth that bites my veins blue and paralyzes the core of cores until it is all I can do to keep breathing. Running is my distraction and I have stopped. I should never have stopped. I will never forgive myself for this, succumbing.

I quit running to feel you.
So I could let go.

I heard her come first. Light rustles in the long grass. The interruption of silence and contemplation by tinkering movement in and out of the trees. When I saw her, she was draped in sunlight. Her white curls gleamed. The shadows caught around her legs were anklets that emphasized the elegance of a deer-like bodice. Her neck sloped as rain does along a pane of glass. She seemed far from glass, though; she was more than porcelain. 'What happened to you?' I even thought she was more than me, for I was a weightless thing, windswept, blown apart and uprooted by the slightest breeze. If I had to give her a name, she would be the Sycamore, or the Maple. The Willow. 'You're dead in the eyes.' I looked into her eyes wonderingly while she chained me to her midst with simple words. Words that were hard to answer because, honestly, did I even know? "I ..." Dead in the eyes, she said. As I gazed upon the living I imagined she saw the emptiness that I felt, the disdain and the regret. Emptiness because I didn't belong. Disdain because I could but I didn't know how. Regret because she should be here to (not) belong with me. And if I said I would promise her anything, would I believe myself? I have nothing to give. Nothing. My eyes are dead.

"I couldn't say what," my soul is too, "I'm sorry if that bothers you."

[ATTY]

coming soon <3

[ATTY]

actually coming soon <3 beat me if i fail thee.

[incipher]

you failed a long time ago. *serious face*







*humps*
;D