happiness is a butterfly — buck & rimi / before
Apr 8, 2024 9:35:27 GMT -5
Post by ines izar d11a 🖤 cait on Apr 8, 2024 9:35:27 GMT -5
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It’s a mild January. A two-layer kind of day, yet she finds herself leaving her second coat in the closet when she leaves the house that morning, wanting to summon rosiness into her cheeks. She relishes the biting frost; the slick of the sidewalk; the quiet of near-empty streets.
To her, Winter is the calming of the chaos. The season where things go to sleep, with heavy limbs of treacle and half-lidded eyes. It has always been the gentlest season to her; some people come to life in Spring, but she finds she is the softest, greatest version of herself in the snow.
In the fall, she’ll start at the community college. It seems like the right thing to do.
Because it’s okay to not know what you want to do at twenty, sure – but you have to at least try and act interested in something. That’s why she buries her nose deep into the leather-bound cloth of a second-hand textbook, trying to make sense of the complicated rules of syntax. The room smells of dampness and mould, one and the same.
Need you to look after the store today.
Sure, okay. No problem. She just has to try not to suffocate in the stifled place, and then.
And then.
The bell above the door jingles with conviction.
In the back room, she waits for the secondary chime of interest to peel through the store. No point in greeting strangers who are simply browsing. An ear stands to attention, and she tries to resume her reading, but there’s a buzzing through her veins that keeps her on the edge of concentration.
A minute slides by.
Two minutes.
Three.
Two hundred and four seconds later, she makes the decision to investigate, begrudgingly unfurling out of the lotus position she so often finds herself defaulting to.
She won’t know it yet, but the end of the world starts with the gentle beating of a hummingbird’s wing. An imperceptible flutter carried on the wind, honey being sucked from the stamen of a moth orchid. The chill of the outside world clings to his bodice; like any creature of the arctic, she is drawn to it.
To him.
Beginnings and endings all feel the same to a soul half-slumbering.
She looks at the stranger’s face, only to avert her eyes half a heartbeat later. Finds a stray piece of tulle to busy her hands with as she counts the sluggish seconds it takes for her to find her voice and speak through the cotton padding in her mouth.
“Hello.”