#and ur muse is all wow it's so pretty!and cuongs like

[phantombs]

Cường lives in another world. He's here, feels the same rain that everyone else does, the same sun and same springtime wind, too, but that's all where it ends. Walk a mile in his shoes, maybe just an inch even, and most would believe themselves in some inescapable nightmare. Fact is, his world is death on repeat. Even when the days are golden and sweet, flowers fat and full in the fields, Cường always wades languidly in graveyards. He sees bodies about every corner, catches ghosts looming beyond the doorways, and there's so much out there in his surroundings: a woman on the streets and a man in the river – he smells rot, smells fire, and hears agonized, ear piercing cries. It's always like this. He shops for groceries and sees the departed fat with swamp-rot. They wade between the garlic and crates of mandarin, and he bever ever startles. Never even jolts. With foul death mundane, he instead focuses on the fleeting; he more appreciates flowers and birdsong and delicate things.

[phantombs]

“Have we been here before? Together?" the stranger asks, gaze all-seeing and owlish. Lost. Cường makes to speak. His lips part for the words, too, yet still do they latch stickily in his throat, caught and honeyed, the sweet and bitter. But why is that? Why the sweet and the terribly bitter? Cường slumps, streetlight hazy about him, and he thinks it’s because he sees himself in him -- or all about him, rather, plus love and hurt. Weird. Why? "No. Maybe not. But maybe we did, and maybe not for the first time. You feel like memory, actually. Like a well worn road. My shoes walk one often. They’ve got holes now."

@heartarise​.