#shows like him beyond the polished veneer he props up

[recitedemise]

𝗚𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗱𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗵𝗶𝗺𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗼𝗽𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗱𝗶𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲. Even as a child, Gale struggled to find steadfast friends. He had rambled too much, was a prodigious student among overly envious wizard boys, and honestly, to make sure he kept in the good graces of most, he, with some practice, hammered a mold. He didn't wear a mask, of course, more leaning on concealing his more 'unsavory' quirks, but it was not unlike walking like just half of he was--offering, essentially, the more 'palatable' parts. He was proud, sure, riling his share of more insecure peers, but he was good at magic, obnoxiously good, and in time, people weathered that pride to essentially ride his coattails. As Mystra's chosen, however, that doubled in force. He learned to hide himself, learned he was loved exclusively for magic. He made more friends among those lonely evenings in his tower, growing familiar with the voice of long dead authors and finding, of course, fulfillment in words. In fact, his idea of romance comes largely from words. It's partly why when smitten, he's such traditional ideas. He's not socially inept, mind you, but many of his thoughts come taken from stories, and if asked, he'd admit to having his heart steeped a touch in romanticism--though age, blessedly, has tempered the naive.

With the orb, unfortunately, he learned to quell himself only further. Gale could only feel so much, a terrible weight for a man who longs most to be seen and heard. Again, he'd further stemmed his excitements, his babbling passions and the stars in his eyes, and even despair and heartache were halved or quartered, or else, of course, the orb would burst. Now, he's learned not to be burden, that on top of being something half of himself. Suddenly, Gale being Gale wasn't just halfway a nuisance, but Gale being Gale could be more than inconvenient--Gale of Waterdeep is now plainly catastrophic.

Gale doesn't exactly hate himself, but it's hard for him to think anyone would like him for him. He's so starved to show himself just as he is--and it's partly why he rushes to give himself over completely when the moment's right.

[dandytanaka-blog]

Timeless

A girl struggles against the pain of her memories as she searches for closure from her grandfather and, ultimately, a way to find the road to happiness. 

By Tanaka Dandy~

Timeless

 There is a clock that sits in a field made up of browned summer grass that sticks up like a broken rib through cracks of cement winding and weaseling from fence to fence. Across from a clock that seems to be squatting now is a plain brown bench, made up of driftwood planks and held together by chewed up gum bits and the syrup of coke spit out under the sun.  

 There is a girl who sits here, on this driftwood bench, near this mundane clock, in jeans faded an Easter egg blue and a shirt striped green on white with stains from kids she plays with in the pleasant heat of California days. Her hair is long and her black locks intermix with the brown of the bench and the sunlight that wanders through its aged planks. Around her neck hangs a silver locket, worn and beaten from love and time, and little beads of sweat dance against the back of the chain, gluing it to her chest. She buys the same sugar bread from an older woman who sits on a corner outside a shop named, “Street Shop,” about a five-minute walk away from the park.

 She finishes off the sugary bread on her walk, of course.

 She sits on the bench wriggling open her locket as she sheds a tear or two. As soon as the locket clicks open, it drops from her fingers, and from then on she doesn’t stir from her perch upon the bench until night comes and it’s time for sleep again.

 Occasionally a student decides to take a shortcut home through the park for a week or so, and wonders what exactly this beautiful girl in blue jeans and an almost white t-shirt sees, staring at a perfectly plain clock for the entirety of an everyday afternoon.

 They never ask though, as she continues her staring at the clock, and there’s a feeling, deep down in their hearts, that it’s better that they not know.

 Sometimes words are not adequate answers.

 Today we follow this girl home. She walks in ripped, purple converse up a hill, taking a left and then a right and another right.

 After her door clicks open, she kicks off her shoes using the sole of her left foot and the polished wood of the floor. There are green plants in red buckets, both dead and alive, that surround an entry way filled with shoes and abandoned hair ties.

 We move, and she sits in her room now, propped against a yellow wall with a picture book that begs us in and shows us another time.

 This same girl is little now, next to a grandfather that’s tying a brand-new locket around her neck. They’re both smiling in the mist of the memory as we watch.

We move again, to another scene filled with a handshake between the girl’s grandfather and a tall, lanky man in a suit.

 Post handshake, he sits in his office at a large, black desk made from the wood of what used to be a surely strong tree. His little granddaughter from earlier is propped up at her own black desk cut from the same tree just a few feet away. She plays with toys, building a skyscraper out of yellow and red Lego pieces, heavy on the back of the wood her elbows press against.

 “Why are you so happy today, grandfather?” the girl asks.

 “I’ve got my first job in a very long time,” her grandfather answers back.

 Circled around the room are drawings and sketches of rather large buildings and warped clock faces with interesting hands shaped more like pipes than tellers of time. They are all rubbed with charcoal on yellowed pages and held up by thumbtacks and the frayed ends of next-door neighbor pieces.

 Our girl gets up, rubbing her fingers like pulled rubber erasers over the charcoal that floats off the pages and into the air.

 “Aren’t designs supposed to be sharp drawings, grandfather?” the girl asks. For a brief moment, though, the little girl we see asking her grandfather questions has aged into her older self, and turns around to hear her mentor’s answer.  

 Her grandfather looks up and smiles; he hasn’t missed a beat.

 “Darling, I’ve got a secret to tell you, and it’s that I’m not very good at making building designs at all,” he responds.

 “Then how could you ever dream of making a clock tower?” the aged girl asks. She can’t look at him now, her eyes stuck to wood floor that rests, satisfied catching charcoal dust at the bottoms of her sockless feet.

 “I think that’s just it; I’m only dreaming, Love. Sometimes, though, life has a way of spinning those dreams up and into stars,” he says, smiling as he looks up at her.

 Our girl’s aged veneer vanishes here, and a little girl looks at her grandfather, bearing a timeless smile that we’ve never seen before.

 We watch from behind our clock-watcher girl from before as her younger counterpart scampers back to her own desk to work again on her very own skyscraper buildings, pushing away her Lego pieces in favor of long cuts of paper.

 The clock-watcher girl smiles at a photo of her grandfather with his arm wrapped around his little girl as she sketches buildings from her runaway night dreams, wondering just how far back her memories go.

 Back in our picture book world, the old man moves back to his desk and his trusty charcoal.

 “Do you know Love, what hard work really is?” he asks his young girl.

 “You keep going and going grandfather,” she answers back.

 “That’s very close,” he responds.

 “No I mean you keep going on and on about hard work, grandfather,” she quips.

 “Well that’s true, but I think it’s important, you know,” he says, getting up to hang another drawing on his wall.

 The sketch is simply the first layer of a very tall building.

 “Everyday you wake up, you become a different person, completely separate from the person you were yesterday. All the work you put in, say on a Monday, is really going to benefit you on Tuesday, and the same goes for every day, day after day,” he starts.

 The little girl, with eyes that dart across the room in search for answers, rubs her fingers back and forth across the right corner of her drawing paper.

 But our picture book-viewer is glued to the aged pages of her book with fingers fraying against the jagged corners of a leather bound cover, as she struggles with ears that seem quite ready to bleed to hear her grandfather’s words.

 The back of her skull feels tight, stretched with anxiety as her memories fight against the passage of time.

 “Until one day, this drawing I have will finally be complete, and not just on paper, but in the world we walk in; there’ll be a clock that we can look at together, my darling,” her grandfather’s words finally seep back into her brain.

 “What will it look like grandfather?” the little girl asks.

 Her grandfather turns around, with a huge smile on his face.

 He sees his little girl, we know, but it feels like his eyes look far beyond, out of the range of his pasted black and white photo to the eyes of his granddaughter, grown now, crying with her shoulders against the back of her bedroom door.

 “It’ll be oh so beautiful my dear,” both the grandfather and his older granddaughter say.  

 “Let me describe it for you,” her grandfather says, taking out a big piece of a paper from a huge roll.

 “There will be water that shoots out of the hands that tell time and staircases that move like elevators, leading up to the very top where people will play cards and tell stories about dragons and dancing. And there will be food, so much food!” the grandfather shouts, drawing huge plans with crumbling charcoal on ripping paper. The design seems still on paper but the charcoal flying through the air makes the building feel alive and breathing.

 The little girl laughs and cracks around the room like a freshly lit, popping firecracker. Her grandfather grabs her by the hand and dances her around in circles.

 Magic permeates throughout the room now, and the dust that has gathered on the edges of every corner of the room floats up, filling the space and transforming the air into a mass that looks quite like outer space. Here a girl and her grandfather dance on the edges of galactic existence.

 “And the tower will stand high above the land so as soon as you walk out your door, from your very own steps you’ll be able to see it, hanging in the sky, and you’ll know I’ll be there, too, enjoying my very fine clock,” the grandfather lets out, smiling with his eyes closed as the space around him moves and vibrates.

 “Will people come from miles and miles away to see it grandfather?” the little girl asks.

 “Oh certainly my dear, it’ll be a grand ole thing to see. People will come from all over the world,” her grandfather replies.

 And so they smiled and danced the night away on the surfaces of stars and planets with exploding cores and funny rock faces.

 They stayed for months, just like that, in a process of school ending and dream building. A summer spent in an old office, just a grandfather drawing and telling his granddaughter all about the music his design would bring to the world.

 She listened and he talked and together they created happiness in and for each other.

 We move forward now, to another page of this picture book. Here among the charcoaled pages is a picture of the girl’s grandfather, sullenly shaking hands with a lanky man in a dark suit just outside his office door.

 The picture moves and changes, and we see the little girl’s grandfather picking her up from school, and as they walk, she talks.

 “Why do you look so sad today, grandfather?” the little girls asks.

 “Oh, it appears the plans for my clock have been finalized, Love,” he says, cracking a smile.

 “That’s great grandfather! Can you show me where it’ll be?” the little girl asks, dancing and shaking in front of his heavy legs.

 There is a grandness of not knowing across her face, solidified in the levity of her eyelids as they move up and down freely. The whiteness of her teeth reminds us of all the coffee we’ve ever had, and we’re glad she’s never had a sip.

 “Sure, my dear,” her grandfather replies back.

 They pass through the park we visited with our older girl earlier, now empty save for the bench. There is no clock to pass the time.

 “They can fit your tower here grandfather, can they?” the little girl asks, shrugging her shoulders as she crunches through the grass, examining the confines.

 “No, I don’t think they will, Love,” her grandfather replies. He wears a smile, like someone who’s preparing to say goodbye, just as the door cracks open for their big, scary adventure.

 There are tears running down his face, but he is tall and mighty and no little girl will see the hands of this old clock run down.

 “Then why’d you agree to put it here, hmm?” she asks him.

 “Well, I think, it’s timeless, and no place should be so,” he replies.

 “What funny phrases you know, grandfather,” the little girls says.

 She pulls him forward, tugging his hand home.

 “Let’s go back and talk more about the clock grandfather!” she shouts, a finger pointed in the wrong direction.

 He smiles, as he’s pulled back home by the happiness of youth, so utterly out of time and sucked out of space.

 And here we are again, in this studio, as a little girl dances alone while her grandfather sits, sweating over a piece of paper at his desk. He never draws, and he never speaks; he only drinks coffee, occasionally laughing at his granddaughter’s dancing the winter away.

 We turn another page, and the smell of spring wafts in as we watch a grandfather picking up his granddaughter from school.

 “Today we’re going to see your clock, right grandfather?” the girl asks, twisting around in her scarf and school uniform.

 Her grandfather doesn’t answer, his eyes glued to the sky above as they walk side by side through the park gate.

 Directly across from the bench stands a single clock face, devoid of stairs like elevators and water spout hands, planted on the cement of a single pole.

 “I’m sorry,” her grandfather cries, as his little girl approaches the clock. He falls to his knees, bone against the hot pavement, beaten.

 He lets go of her hand.

 “It seems that for all of my pretty words,” he continues, “all I could muster for you was this rackety thing.”

 The girl has moved forward, and she dances around the clock.

 For a moment, her grandfather swears he can see drops on the tips of her hair form waterfalls like clock hands as she dances in the sky above him.

 “Do you think I’ll ever be able to climb all the way to the top grandfather?” the girl asks, jumping and reaching for the very tip of the clock.

 “Oh darling, I think one day you’ll fly,” her grandfather replies, getting back up off of his knees.

 The brilliance of his smile returns as they dance one more time in the heat of a yesterday summer. We can see the brilliance of a simple clock in a timeless park with an ordinary bench like one of the gigantic wonders of the world, with waterfalls for hands and lights that shine like a morning sun over high mountains.

 We move forward again to a photo of a simple note left on a desk that, undoubtedly, our little girl will discover.

 I’m sorry.

 There is a bottle of pills, opened and emptied next to the note. Our little girl looks to her left, through an open door, and disappears.

 We jump from the picture book, barely escaping as its ends slam shut, and see our older girl, her back pressed against the cool wood of her door.

 She holds a worn version of her locket in her hand.

 I think I cried too much.

   The sun comes out over the park once more, and we, out of her memories, see our girl walk into the park and find her bench. She sits, hauntingly still, against the brown bench held together by melted coke syrup and abandoned gum.

 We expect that as her eyes move towards the clock, we will see that same plain, cement statue, erected atop the ashes of her grandfather’s greatest dream. We expect to remember, just as she does, the pain of memory, born from the pages of that magical photo book she keeps at home.

 This time is different.

 When we move our eyes, just as she does, we see the clock as she truly sees it: a grand clock with waterfalls for hands and a party scene erupting from the very top, taller than any skyscraper in London or Japan. The scene is complete with a grandfather and his little girl dancing through the mist gathering thanks to the waterfalls above.

 “You’ve made a beautiful thing, you have,” the little girl laughs, twirling in the shadows.

 The magic of the moment fades, though, and our little girl and grandfather are whisked away like dust in the night’s breeze, leaving only the cement clock and brown bench behind. The pain of a love long gone remains.

 Rain begins to fall over the scene, and just as our girl is ready to gather her emotions again and retreat, a small boy made only of bones and a black jumper with a rotten violin resting on his left shoulder glides like a ghost over the cement to the bench where our girl sits.

 As he floats atop the cement like a bird skimming against the foam of a lake, notes play into the scene and the cold air of the night begins to shift; the change makes the scene feel like a painting, full of the colors, tints and shades that make up memories like the ones we saw in the picture book of a grandfather and his granddaughter.

 Instead of passing through the park amidst the rain like the average passerby from every day since her grandfather’s passing, the boy with the violin chooses to take a seat on the bench next to the girl as musical notes erupt from his skinless fingers and breathe life unto the scene.

 Time seems incapable of passing in this moment, and our girl’s heart begins to burn with an inescapable heat, rising from the deepest wells of her chest the more she watches drops of rain slip into the absolute coldness of the skeleton boy’s abandoned eye sockets.

 There is fear beating in her chest, amidst the flames of the rising heat, and she can feel it in the shaking of the raindrops around her, too. But she doesn’t leave, and it feels like she never will.

 Notes continue to play, and she sits still, attempting to figure out how to truly hear them.

 In this new world, filled with notes and spinning on an axis of sound, our girl escapes the drowning rain of her usual life. The crumbling of the ground beneath her stops, and the loneliness of her memories is filled with the togetherness of the music that dances around her. This skull boy has given life to the field around them, but more importantly, has given life back to the girl who sits on the bench.

 Here she is happy.

 As the feeling in her chest grows and the music plays on, the dancing pair, whisked away before, returns to the space under the clock. Water begins to cycle through the clock again and voices can be heard laughing from atop the growing clock tower.

 She listens to the skeleton boy play his songs and even as she closes her eyes, she still feels her younger self moving through the air and spitting on what the world says should be.

 She slowly opens her eyes, and though her grandfather continues to move some safe distance away to the rhythm of the song, her younger self proceeds to move towards her.

 “Would you like to trade places?” her younger self enquires, a hand outstretched.

 The notes around her push her forward as she stumbles up and off the bench as her younger self takes her place.

 The little girl sits with a smile, and reaches for the hand of the skeleton boy who has played his last note for the night. The cold sockets in his skull have never looked more like eyes.

 “I’ll be watching for a while,” the little girl says, disappearing with the skeleton boy into the black night behind our girl as she moves forward toward her grandfather.

 A new rain begins to fall, as our girl stands, breathless, in front of a recently materialized, huge clock tower.

 “Come on, Love, it’s time we go inside,” she hears from behind her.

 There, standing behind her and admiring the façade of his beautiful clock tower with hands made like waterfalls, is her grandfather, with a worn down palm outstretched and a welcoming smile.

 “It’s very cold out, in this rain, you know,” he says, motioning towards the door.

 The pathway she remembers from her own world has turned into a busy street, filled with cars that rush and zoom past them.

 “Just walk, my dear, and you’ll be quite alright,” her grandfather says.

 And so, she walks amidst the traffic with her own hand outstretched, perfectly balanced in a blend of rushing cars and precious space.

 We move forward, after she steps onto the concrete sidewalk, as a scene of the two in an elevator emerges from the rainy fog.

 “I’ve missed you grandfather,” our girl says, clicking her heels together under her very own watchful gaze.

 “Oh my dear, but not nearly as much as I have missed you,” her grandfather says, putting his arm around her shoulder.

 “That simply cannot be true, you in your tower and all,” she replies.

 “You know, the interesting thing about hard work, Love,” he says.

 “I know, I know grandfather,” she interrupts.

 “Is that looking back on it can make you so very sad,” he finishes.

 The elevators open, and he beckons her out with a smile on his face that rekindles the heat in her chest. There are questions she knows not to ask, but she can barely keep them inside the stretching of her stomach.

 We see here, atop the grand clock tower, people dancing, eating and singing alongside beautiful scenes of boys playing violins on beautifully brown, big benches and couples kissing set to the backdrop of an imaginary world’s skyline.

 Our girl stands with her grandfather, gazing out at the skyline through the rain, a rich ice cream in one hand and her head resting on her grandfather’s coat-covered shoulder.

 A cup of coffee shakes in his right hand as he enjoys a beautiful view of the city from his very own clock tower.

 “Why do you still drink coffee grandfather?” the girl asks.

 “Why does the sun shine?” he responds.

 “Well it’s not burned out yet, I suppose,” she replies back.

 “And I’m not quite burned out yet either, I suppose,” says her grandfather.

 “I don’t think you’re quite the Sun grandfather. I think this tower is the Sun,” she says, rubbing her fingers along the grooves and edges of the statues that sit atop the building. She can feel charcoal dust singe the very end of the skin on her fingers.

 “Being the man who created the Sun would be an awful gig, I think,” her grandfather replies.

 “That’s the one thing you can do grandfather. You always say the dandiest things,” she replies back.

 Those dandy words bring a smile to our girl’s face as she tries to bury her nose in her grandfather’s warm coat shoulder.

 “How does it feel to have your own tower, grandfather? Exactly the way you imagined?” she asks, nestled in his coat.

 “It feels timeless, and that’s not a feeling anybody ought to have, I think,” he responds.

 “How’s that?” she asks. Her face contorts up and away from his shoulder and we see them now, standing under the awning of the tower, shielded from the rain, more distant than ever.

 We zoom in on her grandfather.

 “You want to know the interesting thing about life my dear,” he starts, “it’s like every time you find something you quite like, you come to find it’s not really there at all. It’s not like you can reach out and touch it; you can’t grasp it and you can’t feel it. The average person who walks by can’t see it or smell it, and sometimes even your friends don’t know it’s there. That is, unless they’re special people.”

 We see our girl, mesmerized and taken back by her grandfather to summer heat office days.

 “But the fact that it’s not there, like right in front of you, well, I say that doesn’t matter one bit, you know,” he argues with himself, “because if you close your eyes, it’s all around you.”

 “Finding a good song, well maybe that same meaning isn’t something everybody else can hear, but you hear it, and you hear it the most when you close your eyes and really listen” he says.

 “Sometimes you make a clock that sits on a cement pole in an ordinary park and that clock has ordinary hands,” the grandfather continues, “and the people you thought loved you can’t help but laugh at you.”

 He stops here, his sky-gazing coming to an end as he turns toward his fully-grown granddaughter.

 “But then you close your eyes and you dance around with your granddaughter, and it feels like you’re moving under a clock with hands like waterfalls and lights that stretch for miles, and it’s real all over again,” he closes.

 “You sound like you’ve been reading too much poetry grandfather,” she responds, trying not to hang on his every word.

 “On the contrary, I sound like I’ve never read a bit of poetry in my life,” he answers back.

 They stand here for a while, watching the rain slip over the edges of the clock tower awning.

 “If you thought dancing with me was really that beautiful, grandfather, why’d you leave?” she asks, not exactly hoping for an answer.

 “I was weak, it seems, Love,” he responds, “and sadly, there isn’t too much more to life than that. Moments of weakness and strength and not much else in-between.”

 “I would have danced with you forever, under the light of our very own clock tower” she says.

 She looks at him, entirely unafraid.

 “Life is made of beauty my dear, all kinds of it. But none of it should be timeless. There is beauty now, in this moment, and we’re living and feeling it, and there’s beauty tomorrow that we’ll chase for as long as we can, as long as we’re alive,” he starts out.

 He stands up now and outstretches a hand under the rain.

 “But if you keep looking back, at the beauty of yesterday, and what was, then you’re simply looking at beauty that doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to all the versions of you that came before, that felt yesterday’s beauty in the moment,” he ends.

 “You make things seem so wonderful, sometimes, grandfather,” she says.

 She clutches the locket around her neck.

 “It’s only because you’re here to listen,” he answers back.

 “Wouldn’t you like it if I stayed here forever?” she asks him, facing him now.

 “Living in the past is like stealing all the happiness from all the people you were before. There is a you that lives here, forever with me, but you’re not that person, that memory. You are moving forward, forever changing and altering and seeking beauty,” her grandfather responds.

 The black around her lightens and she seems to be moving so far away from her grandfather, bony shouldered and in the rain.

 “Do me a favor and bring the girl back who danced with me and made buildings in the summer heat. I miss my granddaughter, you know,” she hears him say.

 We open our eyes again, just as our girl opens hers, sitting against the brown back of an empty park bench.

 All we see now is a girl playing with her grandfather, not under waterfall clocks hands and bright city lights, but under an ordinary cement pole with a clock that breathes time into the park.

 Our girl gets up, pacing over to the little girl and her grandfather dancing around the mundaneness of the clock, and she ties her pretty locket around the pale cement pole.

 We see her leaving, her back turned, and we know she’ll never return again, to this park, so utterly timeless.

Tanaka Dandy