I should have loved a thunderbird instead
at least when spring comes they roar back again
Aegean no longer knows what it means to have a home—not really. The idea has bled from him a long time ago, leaving instead an emptiness that rings inside of him, a siren’s call that takes him further and further into the depths of his own imaginings. He leaves the outside world, in his own way. He withdraws completely from it, choosing instead to paint his own reality and find some level of comfort within it.
Not true comfort, he knows, because his illusions are not real.
But when he finally does come to rest each night, the warmth of his imagined Pteron is real enough.
Still, there is an emptiness that he isn’t fully able to solve and it grows with each passing day, leaving him with the kind of sadness that does not always abide. It has teeth, this sorrow. He finally feels that, although he has always known the beauty of a love’s kaleidoscope of colors, he knows its counterpart. He knows the endless depth of it, the way that he can pull the shadows over his head like a blanket.
So he doesn’t know what to do or say when he glances up and Pteron is there. For a second, he believes it to be an illusion—something of his own imagining—but he has spent enough time with his craft to be able to tell the difference between reality and his paintings. His breath catches on his tongue and the stars that he had been painting around him come crashing to the ground, splattering and then disappearing.
It leaves the two of them to stand there, facing one another, with nothing of his paintings to distract. It leaves him glowing in the faint light, his antlered head swung up, his purple eyes clear.
“Pteron?”
His voice is lower than usual, caught somewhere between the smoke and the ash.
“Is that you?”
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
(I think I made you up inside my head.)