#tgcomb.

the gentle color of melancholy blue...a novella

genre. literary fiction

status. draft 01

goal. + 30k

narration. first person, joel liebel-petit

themes. ptsd, growing through trauma, unhealthy coping mechanisms, anti-semitism, class differences, mommy issues, the importance of art, tea as a metaphor for love, archaeology, nature is healing, the storm is inside the man. 

 summary. 

joel petit lives with bones and ghosts. when his second mother dies in the spring, he returns to paris to see off her remains and digest their tumultuous relationship with bottles of expensive champagne and the shreds of her last poems. he expects: disappointment, a distraction from his degree in archaeology, more trips to the bar than healthy. 

instead he finds: ash yentl, a slightly mad artist whose paintings crawl into joel’s skin, tearing through memories he’d long buried. as they begin to connect through shared memories of ink and loss, joel finds himself on a cliff side by the sea digging up dinosaur bones with ash by his side. but as each rib of his new, silent life settles into place, ash begins to spiral deeper into his insanity and a storm takes to the waters, ready to destroy each stone of their steady existence.

death has a way of perfecting things- stilling the features, encasing something that had once been so delicate in a film of permanence that could not be touched. it weaved stories of bones and blood and cells within its cold, forever grasp. it forced you to remember,  and that was a hauntingly devastating thing.