Pathos - A Duskwood Fanfiction

Chapter 10

It was raining again.

Which was something that was never too far off on the horizon in Duskwood, Jake had found. Even when the sun was shining in full force and the midday sky was that brilliant cerulean that can only happen when there isn't a cloud for miles, there was still the unspoken promise of the grey, opaque mist that seemed to be the town's signature laying dormant in the periphery of things, weaving through every shadow and silhouette as it impassively bided its time.

So as he stood silently under the awning of the back entrance of the motel, his gaze lifted away from the muddy gray static that had become the motel's gravel driveway as the rain pelted down and rose upwards towards the sky searchingly.

The colour of a bruise, he found himself thinking, as the torment of clouds swirled labouriously above him. That deep and dark colour of wet slate at a river's edge as its waters lapped hungrily at the shore, mottled with the stark vividness of the almost-purple that a bruise blooms into on its second or third day of its interminable reabsorption back into the bloodstream from which it came.

He had never understood the general aversion to overcast and rainy days that so many others seemed to share. Where other people seemed to find that the masking of the sun created an intolerable ennui that left them restless and irritable, Jake had only ever found solace. He had often wondered in puzzlement, as he futilely attempted to see what they saw to try and gain some sort of understanding, how they did not see the richness of vision that the diffusion of light afforded their environments when the sunlight was muzzled by clouds.

Things just looked so much more... present without the harshness of direct sunlight that cast severe shadows and contours over the landscape. He wondered if that was the difference - they saw the sunlight as granting things a three dimensional presence that inclement weather stripped away from them, whereas he found that the smoothing effect of light that diffused through uniform cloud cover enabled him to see a thing exactly for what it was. No blinding patina of brightness to obscure the reality of the colours and shapes of things, no aggressive shadows to lend misleading depth. And in this way, reality seemed so much more vivid and true to him. Colours and textures and edges - all seemed to stand out in denuded, unadulterated relief.

Perhaps only a little neurodivergent, he found himself thinking absently, as his eyes drank in the slow swirling of gloomy and sombre clouds above him.

He was unaware of how long he had been standing there, watching the grandiose theatre of the sky and listening to the rain pummel the driveway, but it was a welcome change of scenery. It was becoming more frequent, he had noted, that the normally soothing familiarity of artificial light that glowed from the multitudinous screens in his employ now instilled a deep restlessness within him.

Not an unexpected fallout after four years, he thought musingly. But still. Unpleasant.

He often wondered if that was what the experience of depression must be like - existing in an environment whose very light source was necessary to see and survive and to achieve the things that needed to be done to see another day, but whose light was also unbearably nauseating, endless, and without relief. Like one couldn't turn it off, even for a moment, because if they did, the darkness that then enveloped them only served to delay the inevitability of having to turn it back on. What relief, what succour could be found in such darkness? Might as well just...continue. To no forseeable end, because the beginning had never truly ever been. A Möbius strip.

Perhaps only a little depressed, then?

But before he could fall into the choppy waters of self-diagnosis, the sudden sound of the door behind him quietly opening seized all thought, and he turned his head slightly to see Mrs. Walter pushing open the door with her back, holding two steaming mugs of coffee. Quickly, he reached out to hold the door open as she navigated herself out under the awning, and watched as she wordlessly held out one of the mugs towards him.