❝ When a man first needs you and afterward calls you a friend, a little suspicion is a healthy thing. ❞ / for The Gentleman from Sahar
@anakhronus . memes memes memes . accepting
There is a scent of salt in the air.
The gentleman can feel its bite upon dry, thin lips, in the way that it hugs into his dark hair and holds onto it. Over the woman's shoulders, he can feel the dark silhouette of the sea - hear it: the waves crashing against harsh lines of concrete. Unfeeling in their dark grey visage, unmoving in the strength of the wind.
The gentleman always found it fascinating how these beings who harboured so much light, were capable of sculpting sand into the softest thin layers of glass to make shapes ground in reality or completely off it could so easily shift to create places such as those: for function, without a modicum of evidence that it had at any point been touched by a human's mind.
He knows it is a dock from the blurry and hard shapes they impinge upon the corners of his vision. Looking upon them directly, however, they are fuzzy and threatening to fall apart if he focused fully on the woman in front of him, on the old table that they shared. Beneath the waves, he hears the voice of a woman though her words are too soft to tell, and so he lets them go.
❝ When a man first needs you and afterward calls you a friend, a little suspicion is a healthy thing. ❞
Her voice cuts through the fog and the office that surrounds them comes into focus. Lines of books of a myriad of different neutral tones, the age of some of them weighs heavier on the same shelves. Somewhere a computer hums softly but that too is out of focus; the light from the ceiling lamp hovers solely over them and so only that matters.
The gentleman smiles, his fingers holding the small, cold cup of black tea covered by a cardboard lid.
"I have been told" he hums, his eyes falling on his company now completely. The edges of his dark eyes wrinkle deeply, their warmth enough to overpower the heaters that laboured in the corridors outside "I am too fond of the sound of the word friend. It rolls off the tongue too easily."
It was beautiful and fragile like blown glass.
He's been told that to wear a word so keenly upon one's sleeves and have it roll off one's tongue would tear its meaning. For a man whose suits were always greyed by dust, wrinkled by age and use: the gentleman could not grasp what that might look like.
The waves crash harder against the pier and now the darkness fully sets it. The sea is only a sound and the salt is only a taste upon his tongue washed by cold tea down his throat. The lamp above them shines on them like a spotlight; the computer screen in the distance feels like a distant light post down a dark street in the light hours of the morning, the letters on the books' spines above them like street signs. Only the salt in the breeze remains and this insistent cold settles as the cup is placed once more on the table.
"I have come to wonder where the line between suspicion and alienation is drawn. It feels like it is so very faint line."
