Meadow

The tide had washed him here some time ago, but Orestes had made little progress since. -Progress..? To what was he progressing? Far above him, pink and orange were streaking across the sky in claw-marks of clouds, stretching off to somewhere far away, shredding apart with the strain of reaching whatever it was they reached for.

Should he not have at least so much determination, so much fortitude, as those clouds..? To tear apart for his beliefs- it was the right thing, and yet here, alone in this vast, open meadow full of lush greenery blooming to life, he couldn’t seem to think of which direction to even start walking. Figures moved in the near distance, bustling along with private lives he didn’t know, and perhaps didn’t have the right to touch, and their presence and their unknownness at every corner of his vision made him feel glass walls all around- his walls, or theirs? He envied their purpose, and he pitied their hurts. Such was all he knew, and maybe that was for the best, though it still hurt.

Turning his golden stare back to the sky beyond the canopy of his leafy shelter, he watched some dark bird-shape swoop by on sharp wings with a little spike of jealousy.

“Have you ever had that feeling where you think you know someone and then you find out that you really don't?”

He didn’t quite jump, but stiffened abruptly, his bright head flashing down to his sudden company with a flutter of faded copper curls. She quirked a head carved of marble and burnished brass at him, her mouth a wry twist he couldn’t quite decide the meaning of, her jewel eyes reading him in a way he supposed wasn’t so unusual, but which he’d grown unaccustomed to in his self-imposed exile, and he shifted under the weight of her attention. Combined with her question- too close, her aim a little too true- he half wondered if she was even real, or merely a figment of his imagination.

“It keeps happening to me this year and somehow I keep getting caught off guard.”

-Not reading his mind then. He looked away on the pretense of examining the horizon to hide his relief.

“It- ah, yes, yes- I… I confess, so much so that I thought you might be my guilty conscience come to haunt me about it,” he admitted, trying to make it sound something like a joke, though the clear stream of his voice was too honest to distract from his tight, serious brow. Glancing back at her gleaming gilded figure a little shyly from beneath his white lashes, somewhat flustered to have been read so easily, he nonetheless gathered himself and, after a moment of hesitation, asked,

“…What is it that you do, when it happens to you?”

Another pause, even more conflicted, before leaning closer to add quietly:

“Did it leave you feeling lost, too?”