Desires Systems: Four
The Islander
A man grown and stuck in youth. His presence could be characterized as soft, quiet, and unassuming. Wandering along stone paths alone. Often lost in considerations outside his understanding, his struggles were mostly process-related. Comfortable in disorientation. Constant side stumbles and backsteps through the protean moments brought unavoidable confusion. A defining trait for the inhabitance of an island sinking through time. Sometimes fun or anguishing.
Living in the sun and amongst the ocean’s quintessence brought to form a well-being he was blessed with.
And love.
A timeline of beauty in the company of others was a lucky life-cord for him, though like others- this season's feelings were of grief. They always understood the hard truth of precarity and the undeniable gravity of impermanence. Bending through emotional constructs interlinked to each other. Homeostasis set or reset as life presences flickered in and out of context like a lens dialing across distances.
Every moment another figure of significance shifts into another position of regard. Receding ever so slightly into unimagined origins.
The god of longing wrapped itself lugubriously around his brown shoulders.
A lei of wilt.
Pothos.
Any memory or reflection a game form. This time it imagined itself as a clinging impish pupae. A nagging weight of desire, a third the size of a human, hung dense but gaunt. Blurred and shadowed, fluxing between thought and form, With a clenched grin and turbid child-sized arms it looped around his neck. Cooing. Pulling his attention from presence to distance. Growing aroused by his grief like an eel in a bodysuit. Suffocating and embarrassing. Immaterial.
Days dragged on. Nothing changed and yet things were unrecognizable. The absence abstracted from person to idea to locality and lives of loss. Opportunities dashed, dreams squandered. Failings believed. The objective was long gone. Those ripples of consequences amplified into further waves of distance to the unrecognizable.
For this godling, the feeling of this weight was fun and satisfying, though not for the Islander. His delicious aches and foolish clinging fed incompletion. The bottom was a party of two, but only one was human.
Pothos grinned.
The sleepwalking islander toiled onward with no idea of what was ahead. Destined to suffer in paradise before whale season. Whale season. Was it a cruel joke?