The Illusion of Discontent.

He sits lopsided, playing his old Harmony as I stare at the glow stars on his ceiling that have long since lost their glow. As I lose myself in thoughts of no importance, he toys with strings, testing out couplets of chords that blend into the background.

And in a way, I guess we complement each other well.

I no longer feel the necessity of speech and he had abandoned such trivial pursuits long ago.

“Words cease to matter when there's no one to listen to them,” he told me, once.

As I lay there, I flick through the many things that have gone through my mind. Many things that I would have quivered to utter aloud. There are some concerns in people that can never be voiced. Less because of cowardice than the loss of air from the lungs, as traitors they hold vocal chords hostage. 

And if, by chance, on the rare occasion they allow leniency, you can see it in the proclaimer's eyes. That irrepressible lust for vertigo. To feel the ground's support - if nothing else - they so long for beneath their feet. To fall onto it would not be such an unpleasant fate, would it? There are worse things, I concur.

I guess it's at moments like these, with Papageno leaning against the bed, his downcast eyes searching for a resolution in strings. With me beside him, dividing my attention between raptures of fantasy and the fixtures of reality. It's moments like these that you contemplate the little glitches in humanity without much consequence. Learning no more about the world around you than what you have known before. You think you do. You might walk out of that room with a new-found revelation about things as they are with a conviction the likes of Parmenides, but then someone says something or does something and you falter. That is why I have a fondness for confines.

I mean, when I think of Parmenides, I think idealist. Probably the most defined in existence, with maybe the exception of the divine. But things aren't always so clear cut as he declared them to be. The whole divide between the positive and the negative, the light from the dark. If a man kills a man for the freedom of the people, does that make him inhumane? Does that make him a negative force in the universe?

Would anyone ever have the answers? Questions penetrate resolves, they do. And people are scared. Paranoid. The foundations of their lives may be built on lies, but stoop to untangle them, they won't. People sure as hell won't change, but wonder, they might. And that spark of wonder, of curiosity, well. That about haunts them 'till they die.  

I feel a tear roll down the length of my cheekbone and his thumb reaches out on instinct to brush it aside, ceasing his strumming once more. And I just look at him and he frowns back. His right hand cups my face and I feel the cool metal of his ring against my wet cheek as he comes in close and whispers in my ear. 

"I wrote you a song." 

He adopts this boyish smile as he slides his fingers from my face gently. He turns back to his guitar and arranges the fingers instead to strum its strings in a most peculiar pattern which conjures the word 'beautiful' in my head. It's insufficient, but isn't language always? Just letters strung together in futile attempt to convey feeling. Feeling. As if you could explain it as you would a fact.

With this staining my thoughts, and with Papageno by my side, we stay unhinged to a world that spins madly on. This will surely get us into trouble one day. This, weightlessness, that we sail the days on. Yet, I can't bring myself to care. We may be long gone, but we are content.