The scent of paint heavy in the air, choking like the dst that choked the canary years and years ago until he fell down. Ashes, ashes.
Sitting here while my aunt paints the inside of her garage because there's wireless connections to piggyback on everywhere, puting away the bins of shoes that will never be worn because her grand daughter's growing up and her husband can't change his shoes when he's scattered across the lake. Ashes, ashes.
Cool air blows in through the open doors and carries with it the sound of gulls over head and cars going by and the smell of freshly fallen rain and smoke. Ashes, ashes.
The step digging into my back and the cold cement seeping through my socks. Late morning/early afternoon sunlight drifting in. The air feels like automn. The leaves are all falling off the trees and the geese are flying south. Of course their geese, not gulls. What the hell am I thinking? The muscles in my shoulders ache from sitting here and from horseback riding three times this week and it's supposed to be a good sort of ache, that's what all the books says but it's just a pain, it just hurts in that way that I've gotten too used to too fast; too much time calculating physics equations in the last week. A Tori song stuck in my head. Thoughts of dreams and conversations and journal entries that are filtered from everyone that knows me and stories and articles and it's all so clinicle but I can't see the forest for the trees. But that's ok. The forest is burning down, anyway.
Ashes, ashes.

love

So, if I’m understanding this right, you don’t believe that love is real. Instead, you think of it as a word that is tossed around and miss used. Tell me. How can one miss use something if it isn’t real?

I never said I didn’t believe in love, just that I don’t understand it. It’s a barrier thing. The line. Define it for me.

What the hell are you talking about?

The line that separrates “like” from “love”. Where is it? How do you know when you’ve crossed it?

It’s different for everyone, of course. You can’t define it.

Then how do we know it exists?

It’s just something we take for granted. Some people can’t love at all, some love too often and too deeply and they end up getting hurt.

How sad for them.

Oh, don’t be like that. If you insist on having this conversation, the least you can do is take it seriously.

Alright. Seriously. Why is love so coveted? The way you put it, all it seems to bring is sadness. Am I to believe that the entire world is made up of masochists?