❝ I’m making a new home. ❞
for some, the ocean isn’t a home. perhaps it was once, or perhaps the fit was never right from birth ever forward. a knowing sense of wrong that lasts as long as memory can offer you, an itch that feels like it’s burrowed into your very heart. found home in the ventricles and spread itself, thorny vines no one could remove without bleeding to death. the cure is change. poison that can eat out even the strongest roots and leave you healthier, at the side effect of fear. no one really wants to change, after all. the unknown is often worse than the chance of things getting better.
even indigo shook before entering the queen’s chambers for consultation, a bid to buy themselves freedom out of unseen chains. there would be a change there, failure or success. gatsby could not have shamed her if she had turned away at the last moment and deemed their place not ill, even if not content. worthy of not losing.
so, then, what of those with change pushed on them? no choice for those struck by misfortune, singled out by the hands of fate or the cruelty of others and torn apart without a word edgewise. they, gatsby has realized, make the most tragic of songs. epics of poetry. things worthy of tears from even the cruelest eyes and blackest, emptiest hearts. how many songs has gatsby memorized that could tell the story of this little one that he knew from so long ago, in the years of travel? how many has he written, the tale of a taken and a fool, or a fool and a monster, or--
well. so the stories go. songs do not tell the truth blatantly, they speak of it through hearts and wounded minds. caspian could have been sung about time and time again without gatsby truly realizing it, no man in the crowd to recognize the truth in those lyrics. now, with him standing before the elder syren, most of those songs feel very far away.
there are, gatsby thinks, many chapters to caspian’s life that he’s missed. pieces that haven’t been put together in his eyes yet, hinted at only here and now. a hunger twists through his insides. softened in his face as he tilts his head to the side and breathes in, slowly. lets those words simmer to nothing in his mind before even considering a reply.
“home is... we all need home. places and people or one of the two.” gatsby knows his luck. home is a person, home is someone that will be with him as though stitched together by steel wire through old wounds. who has caspian had? “build your home, it’s better here than down in the darkness. cold waters aren’t worth thinking of, i promise. it’s just homesickness. but when you’re done--”
or before, or during, but impatience looks good on no one.
“i’d like to hear about it.”
HAYLEY KIYOKO