[It always ends up like this, when he thinks about his parents for too long.]
[This is a strange nostalgia, the kind that takes you along for the ride kicking and screaming like a child in the backseat of a car; you're going somewhere you've missed, but you don't want to look out the windows any longer than you have to. You can't look anywhere else, yet you don't want to see things pass-- you just want to be there. You lose track of how many backroads and roundabouts you take along the way just for the familiar sceneries and dizzy feelings, no matter how many times you ask yourself "Are we there, yet? "]
[His mind recounts a story in the same way that he so often is prone to, telling 5 different ones before reaching the conclusion of the first. Leaving him nodding along, hopelessly sucked in and wondering when it'll get to the long awaited conclusion. That's what makes willful remembering such a risky game; you fish for a happy memory, and come back with a few extra sad ones. So hard to single out one from another, take one and leave the rest, especially once he gets snowballing.]
[Parsley just wants to remember his Dad's cooking and his Mom's airy laugh, a rough hand ruffling his eternally wild hair and another two holding his own tight when it felt like his chest would burst from everyday hurts... without also having to remember the nights he'd hole up in his room, biting his tongue so hard it was dangerous and grinding his teeth down to nothing. He wants that sugary taste of store-bought cherry pie without the added bitterness that comes from knowing he won't ever have it the same again. It doesn't taste right when it isn't being shared, not sitting pretty at the center of that ugly green dinner table he can picture so vividly at the drop of a hat. It feels as if he spent too long growing up and waiting to be done doing it, like the whole time he was steeling himself for these moments of weakness and still fell short. All that preparation, and for what? SOFT-- he's stayed soft. And he wants so badly for it to be a good thing.]
[He always thought that it was. When you surround yourself, intentionally or not, with hardened hearts beating beneath suits and ties... it sure feels like an undeniably good and right thing. To have trudged home at the end of the day with a similar weight on his shoulders, but a soul refusing to be compressed by that weight. A warmth that cloudless city nights and blaring horns couldn't take, and a genuine interest in making the lives he touches better just by having touched them.]
[But when it aches like this, when the soft bruises so easy that it stays too tender to touch... he can't help but see the weakness in it, too. The trade off, and how pitifully low it can make him sit. How it would've been easier to let the colder side of logic numb his more sensitive nerves, and how it quickly became a weapon against his own defenses.]
[...It's too late for that now, though. No, now all he has are these memories-- sweet ones to savor, sour ones on which to pile his regrets. Weighing them constantly in effort to decide whether he's proud of himself or not.]
[Maybe it'd be easier to decide, if Parsley knew they're proud of him too.]
discoholicmusic
izzy806
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
jbbartram-illu
yousharknotpass
