It's a low morning on a secret beach. The crashing waves seem magnified, as everything else is nearly silent and nearly still.
Betty is still caught up building castles in the sand. Building within the confines of preconceived notions, expectations, fantasy.
Her whole thought process works in constructs--this is "normalcy" and this is "structure" and this is "keeping up appearances" and everything has its place.
This is "what life should be." But it's all sand, Betty. There is no construct. There is no kind of wealth.
But she insists. Constructing an empire on those shifting sands. The attempt to mold her reality into the models that exist in her mind. A dreamy, clumsy child, suffocating itself.
It's hard to watch.
Simon wanders down the shoreline. Composed, yet empty. Desolate.
He's looking for something. Something that could mean more than to just himself. Something that could mean more than himself.
He knows in the wells of his spirit that such a thing couldn't be found. It could only be constructed.
Can anything be constructed that won't wither away?
He knows the answer. It lies in something primal. Something which he feels inherently in his blood, but which his mind has always denied him.
To procreate. To simply participate in that grand wheel of humanity. To have been born into sin, and so to pass the baton of sin. To know that he was found in love, in trouble. A speck of dust plucked from the void. And to allow love, trouble, to find him again.
To give the only gift he's ever really received. To accept that it's enough.
It is the only answer. He will need some more time, some more of that endless beach to wander up and down. More opportunity to deny the truth before he eventually turns around.
He will though. Sooner or later he will walk back up the shore. Return to her doomed construct, founded upon delusion and desperation.
That place called home. For as long as it lasts.
It fucking hurts, for me to pick up a guitar and start playing again. My fingers and nails feel so brittle to its touch. I'm so out of season.
March, 2020