lyle tabus / d8

His mind doesn’t work in the way it used to.

He thinks, once, he was ambitious. But somewhere along the way he mixed ambition and dreamer by definition and lost touch. Through gritted teeth, he spits at the word ambition. For him, that’s red. A climb, a fight - there are many things he would not do to win, and he finds solace in the idea that there is nothing beyond the corners of what he knows. Ambition means success. The son of two laborers would never be the poster child of victory. They are all the working class regardless of positioning, so to fight tooth and nail over a couple of coins seems spastic. Why sacrifice comfort? He is not the monster of a man who could hurt others to succeed.

But he is a dreamer.

A dreamer, to him, is different. He does not aspire to overtake or break the backs of the people that he knows - but he does wish to know how to fly. He wakes up to a room slathered in pastel blue, puffs of white littered lazily around in clumps. Of course, this is the room of someone much younger, but he hasn’t given it much thought. He knows each fleck of paint as his own. Each cloud dabbed on by his own careless shaky hands, each stamped with clear indecision. Always moving and shifting, how was there any way to accurately portray the sky?

There’s a certain solace that comes with the sky; freedom, creativity, flight. he’s always lavished in the idea of flying, the air gently caressing your underarms, raising you to the heavens. And there, you are at peace. Looking through the mud-trodden streets of your sanctuary - picking out each building as you pass. His home was small and quaint hidden amongst the packed neighborhood, fully unremarkable in every way. Hanging out the back on a makeshift clothesline, a stream of colours - his mother’s handiwork. He could see his father, lugging bolts of cloth down cobbled streets, whites, and tans all at the ready for his wife, Lyle’s mother, to create. His toothy grin nodding to everyone he’d pass, a smile he’d pass on to his son. Lyle flapped his wings and took off.

To dream of your home and nowhere else, just to look on to what you already know from a different angle - that to him was the difference between ambition and a dream. He did not want to learn what existed beyond the four corners of his room - kids who did had a knack of not coming back. There was a world that he lived in full of rules and regulations and Lyle wasn’t one to break them.

Simplicity is ideal. There was just Lyle, his mother, and his father. Both his parents had been only children, and he was one himself. His grandparents had all passed away before he’d gotten to know them, just hollow memories of quick visits as a child. But there wasn’t anything missing. There was no hole in his heart yearning for a familial relationship that wasn’t there because it never existed in the first place. That wasn’t to say that he didn’t value family. Lyle loved his parents, they gave him everything that he ever had. His mother was a dyer by trade. Wool, cloth, whatever you needed she could do - she loved blue, so did Lyle. Calming and peaceful, he learned to express his emotions through colour. His father, conversely, was a stripper. Pause. It was mandatory to pause after saying that. A dye stripper. The removal of colour using sodium hydrosulfite or hydrogen peroxide. Not quite as fun as the other stripper though.

This is what he was born to do, this was the business he would take over. A laborer. Hours of wafting chemicals, standing on his feet, mixing batches of colour only to find that the shade wasn’t quite right. Not to mention dry and calloused hands crippled by hours and hours of menial tasking. But what was the alternative? A question he sat with every night. What better life to live than that of a legacy? He could carry on religion, an institute, a family. Maybe his shaggy hair wouldn’t last forever, time could thin it out. Just as time may thicken out his belly, and break his bones. But the legacy was something that would forgo time itself.

Though sometimes, he did find himself dreaming of a different type of simplicity. Almost a shameful secret. A tent. Just a tent. Enough to fit two, three maybe if they were as small in stature as Lyle. A smaller world than his house, a spot surrounded by high flying trees where the sun peaks through branches. A world with no rules and just comforts. Here, there was no Capitol, there was no career, no expectation. A map would find a small clearing, perhaps a well that he built with his own hands. Trees that hand-delivered small fruits for him to feast on, and a friend. Just one friend, that’s all he needed.

This was his guiltiest secret. One shared with only a couple of friends. It was a thought that brought Lyle so much shame, to wish away his family and his life. To wish away his responsibility and job. It all seemed so selfish, and that wasn’t Lyle - at least on the surface. That was Lyle in the deepest recesses of his mind. And was that his legacy? A kid was thrown into work, who could not keep his dirty ambition in check? A kid harnessed with an expectation that couldn’t stop for two seconds to think beyond his dreams?

Where was the line between ambition and dreaming? He thought he knew, but every day it teeters.

And so he goes back to work.