I took my love, took it down.

[digyourman]

The twilight was painted in soft strokes across a tumble of low-slung clouds, pinks and purples distilled from the glitter of the infinite sky to spill over neatly-clipped lawns and gently burbling fountains. Perched upon one of the retaining walls in the English garden, Larry was bent over a guitar propped up by one braced knee, evening shadows chasing across his face as he strummed out a familiar melody with calloused fingers.

A year he'd been in this place; a year of quiet living and silently-borne restitution, a year that felt simultaneously endless and a blink, a year that had fostered introspection and little else. Good things still left him skittish, afraid of what followed, and despite it all the very nature of that feeling seemed another failure.

Frannie had been gone a month, and he still wasn't certain why he hadn't seen it coming.

The back edge of the guitar rested against his chest, each note humming through the thin cotton of his t-shirt and under his skin. He needed a haircut, dark curls sliding across his downturned eyes as began to softly sing.

Even children get older, and I'm getting older, too.

Comments

[digyourman]

"I don't think I'm ever gonna have things figured out," Larry admitted. "There are people come in and out of here everyday, walking through like they know exactly where they are and why. I used to think maybe I just wasn't capable of understanding why I'm here; now I think maybe I'm just not meant to." And wasn't that a bitch.

"I feel like she musta gone back home, though," he abruptly continued, sitting up straighter like the physical effort could force a silver lining. "So that's good. That's where she belongs anyhow. Not here always wondering if there was anything else."

[legendthatwas]

"I have yet to figure out the trick, exactly, myself," said Martha with a wry twist to her mouth, in reference to their compatriots who did come and go at will. "It'd be useful, that--but I do find I tend to land here when I need to be anywhere but home." And maybe that was it, that that touch of uncertainty in her life did her a hell of a lot of good; that she needed to have some bit of adventure alongside day to day life or she'd go mad.

She cleared her throat, pushed a stray strand of hair back against her scalp. "Maybe you're where you need to be, and maybe Frannie is where she needs to be. It's a pretty damn rubbish theory, but it's one at least; though that never stops me from keeping on asking why, anyway. Maybe you're the same."