Is there anything that makes you sad you can think of?
Zestial is still for a long while, the question settling upon him like dust upon an untouched surface. When he finally speaks, it is measured, careful, as though each word must be chosen and weighed before it is allowed to exist.
“It is not a kindness, to dwell upon sorrow,” he begins softly. “One may examine it, as a scholar might a fragile text… but to linger too long is to invite it to rewrite thee in its own hand.”
A faint pause. His gaze drifts, unfixed.
“And yet… there are absences that do not ask permission to be felt.”
His hands come together behind his back, a posture of quiet restraint.
“I have lived long enough that memory itself has begun to erode. Not in great, obvious fractures, but in small, insidious ways. Details first. Then names. Then… meaning.” His voice lowers, touched with something almost imperceptible. “There are moments I know were once precious to me, yet I cannot recall why. Only that they mattered.”
“I cannot say, with certainty, whether the sky above the living world was once blue. I remember that it was… vast, open, unmarred by the weight of this place. But the color has dulled in my mind, as though time itself has worn it thin.” His brow furrows faintly. “It troubles me, that something so simple… should slip beyond my grasp.”
A longer silence follows.
“I do not remember the name of my first love.” The words come quieter now. “I remember the shape of devotion, the presence of it… but not the name I once spoke with such care. It is… an absence that echoes.”
“Nor can I recall my siblings' voices. I know I had them. I know there was laughter, once. Conversation. Perhaps even quarrel. But the sound itself… is gone. Replaced by silence.” A faint tightening at the edge of his expression. “To lose a person is one grief. To lose even the memory of them… is another entirely.”
He turns his head slightly, as though listening for something that will not come.
“I cannot remember a wind that does not carry sulfur upon it. Nor rain that does not burn when it falls. The senses adapt, as all things do… and in doing so, they forget what once was different.”
His voice grows quieter still.
“There are days when I wonder how much of myself remains intact… and how much has been worn away so gradually that I did not feel it leaving.”
A breath. Slow. Controlled.
“I have known loss. I have endured it. That is not what saddens me.” His eyes close briefly. “What saddens me… is that time has taken even my right to remember what was lost.”
When he looks up again, his composure has returned, though something softer lingers beneath it.
“But I do not speak of this often. One learns, in time, to carry such things without allowing them to define the whole.”
A faint, distant note of something almost like a smile.
“For even now… there are still moments worth keeping. And I would not see those fade, too, by giving too much of myself to what is already gone.”
