Block
The soft, pale curves are hard to ignore...but I have nothing to offer them.
I roll over in the plush grass, tearing my gaze away, to watch the multitude of leaves in varying shades of vermillion twist and contort in a light breeze. They seem so badly to want to be torn from that which gives them life.
I know the feeling.
Looking away does nothing for the feeling that I should, in fact, have something to offer for that which entices me so. I usually do. This so rarely happens to me, that I...don't know what to do. Frustration mounts, the longer it takes, and then it's even more difficult to find the right mindset that's necessary for that spark.
I roll back over, letting the movement push the breath out of me on an exhale, and simply stare at the gently fluttering pages of my sketchbook that arch, and catch that breeze now and then, themselves. I practically ache to put something on them - but what? It's all noise, in my mind - this book is supposed to help, but I can't...catch anything long enough to put it on paper, so the damn thing waits expectantly; gently fluffing its pages on the wind as if to beckon something forth, itself.
I feel...I feel - what do I feel? Like a rubber band that's been stretched too far, for too long. The stress of accompanying Kublai to the warfront to retrieve war machina lingers, like a poison - gunshots, explosions...
Three-eyed freaks I could spend the rest of my life killing, and never be sated.
The pages remain blank, before me, pale as Ishgard's snows. What can I give them? War doesn't belong in there. No machines, no Imps. This book of mine is so like my life - I can flip backwards in it, and trace my fingers over the memories so starkly rendered by my own hand that they're almost real.
I can, oh-so-gently, trace the pad of a fingertip down the occasional ragged edge that juts from the gutter of as much, a testament to depictions torn from it in anger - even my poor sketchbook has scars...reminders that I should never have put those I did in its pages, just as much as I should never have let them into my life to begin with.
Like me, it has a head, a tail, and a spine - though unlike me, it is full of beautiful things; here, a koi pond from the Shirogane park with the delicately spotted creatures circling one another; there, the intricate veining of one of those aforementioned leaves. And more often than I'd like to admit, the face of my Wolf looks back out of its pages; scowling, sneering, smirking, looking down his nose...and more recently, smiling...and even laughing.
Like me, it is full of memories - though similarly, the future is unwritten for both of us. Blank pages. Potential. The unknown. What goes there, in that blank space? What comes next? What else is important enough to keep?
The wind kicks up for a beat, forcing a few of those heavy, blank pages up and over, sending us forward in the book - paying no heed to the fact that they remain bare.
Life goes on, whether you're ready or not. Whether you know what's coming, or what you're bringing with you.
And eventually...it ends. I suppose all that matters is that something is on the pages, in the end.
I pull it to me - the book now warm from the sun - and can't help but smile at the sound the paper makes against itself as I flip back to the last empty page that beckoned to me - I think, perhaps, I'll work on my next tattoo's design.