Capricious

24 - Nisbet Rhodes

"People are opportunities. The gift is in the interaction and the connection with another person, whether it lasts forever or not."
- Colleen Seifert

Years passed, I return to this Northern realm of simplicity. Of starry skies and delicious air, it cleans the grit from deep within my skin. It all seems smaller now, the adventuring through the dark forest now a mere stroll through the sunlit woods. Times battling stinging nettles to forge a path to the river replaced by enslavement to lesser goals. The fields of freedom now replaced with chains. I move between the darker, more masochistic of my moods. An escape from one world back into the abuse of another. I have to dig my way out, tunnel to another land, one untouched by the madness that has tainted all I've ever known. Journeys roving through stone-pathed circuits of countryside and ruins. My head clears enough from dwelling on past tortures to form a recipe of day-dreamed futures once more.

She lures me in. Shy sense, round nose, soft smile. Her round white face and sharp dark brown hair cut over rouge lips, hazel eyes, grand lashes. Perfectly harmonious. I find her in my sights a strange amount of time within this maze. Again and again and again there she is, eyes instinctively drawn. Just following the same path, for a time.

A baby blue sky with a spray of pink bubblegum clouds, a raft of crooked dead trees dominating the foreground.

Thundering smoothly through hills of green, split with brown on these metal tracks. The world outside the window sparse, a disorientated barrage of nature and the occasional man-made scar, settled without a touch. It belongs simply to our eyes, vast territory for lives complicated in so different ways than mine. Our ship advances with people searing through it all. I have all I need. The journey hailed with as much vibrancy as my unsure destination is sure to have. Time means nothing here. I have stories, I have music, I have my imagination. My mind talks and dreams and plays with itself. I can't be bored.

Yet there I see, an eyecatcher, wandering across the platform. Howintriguing she seems to be, awash in a suit of childish thread, face burned withcomplication. She passes, another monument whose story I'll never know. Sittingat the table, eyes searching for inspiration, mind forgetting the darkness ofolder times. Moving away again, shifting position to mould into the crook of myseat. She is there. Sat across from me, my little eyecatcher. I try not tostare, move my attention elsewhere, but I can't help it. Her curiously mouseylittle face, holding no expression but a simple focus on streams of art like myown. She looks not at me, preoccupied in her own independent world, enticinglypassionate sketching in musical reserve. Messy toffee hair tied over her thinneck, nose ring sparked with wild impulse, denim suspenders patched withhand-drawn figures. "You're not punk and I'm telling everyone." What curiousworlds has she experienced? Where might she be going? What pain could be hidingbehind those pale blue eyes crossed with black and white? My little rebel. Whatis my interest in her? "The world is a beautiful place and I am no longerafraid to die." I want to know her. I want to share things with her. I want tomean something to her. Should I? Could I? Would I? If only I wasn't trapped bythe etiquette of life.