1928, America
What is memorable about 1928 can be broken down into two sentences.
The fall is full of colors never seen, the winter is mild where it, is when it is, taking place. He notices, without noticing, walking in the snow. The springs are all alike, and people burst forth with them. The summer he wishes heat mattered, when he lays out under it watching the sky pass him by. There is much of the world to bypass and be passed by from.
The season all swirl in a happenstance, half seen and half overlooked.
They aren't a background to his life, or a linear map.
They're just echoes of another life not his now.
The same with cities and states.
It is a beginning when notice's that his human memories, ever grey and slight, have become slighter. He's sure there was something about sunshine, the heat of summer sun, on his skin, somewhere, sometime.
He wonders if he should be angry at it. He can trace all of Esme's earliest memories of this world, and the ones that came before this life for her, can remember all of Carlisle's shared memories, both of his life and of Edward's own life seen through Carlisle's eyes, with more clarity than those slipping from his ability to recall personally.
It is harder to be angry about something no one can control, even if it seems unfair to be able carry all that is theirs, present and past, when he is denied his own. He has better things to be angry about.
Yet alone, doing as he pleases, when and where he would, the anger fades.
Each day finds him cooler in the place that used to boil, the place that used to burn into him merciless and unceasing, before the lack of impetus to keep it going.
There is a blinding, obliterating, coalescing silence in the world he lives in.
One where a million thoughts choreograph a dance he is the endless, solitary spectator for, without a single half note of silence should he be near to life. And yet silence is the abject and absolute rule in his life now. It is the balance. It is the price. It is the punishment.
There is no other who hears his thoughts, and only his prey hears the few words that ever have cause to leave his mouth now. He's always been taciturn over loquacious, but the overlap of their words into his every thought against the backdrop of his own person self imposed, near vow of silence is impossible to miss. As though the speaking part of him has moved beyond him.
When Edward had taken care of his latest choice -- a sarcastic bartender at an upscale hotel, with his fingers deep into things that left him breaking arms and shooting others for pay; and left Edward with an oddly circular memory of a beloved women with a white flower pinned in her hair and violet eyes, both laughing and crying
-- he'd stolen the man's suit and spent the night in the lobby playing sonata's on their baby grand for the first time since before leaving.
Not four weeks later, he is in Chicago.
(Chicago. Specifically. Looking for things he knows he won't find there. )
He looks regardless -- in the apartment buildings that are now tiny corner offices. The room that is his first memory no longer has the same wall paper or furnishings, but the bound notebook on the desk reminds him of Carlisle's. He stares out the window he'd never looked out, before making a hasty retreat from the entire scene. It's more than a mile when he realizes he's still carrying the notebook.
That it's empty is the only reason he never considers turning around, walking down the sidewalk, with his head tilted downward toward it, turning it over and over, too fast for the poor small minds passing him to see well. Not quite listening, nor ever able to ignore, the comments where they convince themselves it's just a trick of the light or having only seen it out of the corner of their eye.
It's the better part of another day, and another conquest which has left his eyes flared glaring red of the first day again, before Edward is sitting in a tree with a pen, writing the first two sentences that will start a lifelong collection of journals, as the rejection of the entire idea of writing one, which smacks of following in Carlisle's footsteps still.
And still he writes, in slow, painstakingly correct, tilted handwriting --
Today would have been a decade.
I still haven't forgiven him.
The fall is full of colors never seen, the winter is mild where it, is when it is, taking place. He notices, without noticing, walking in the snow. The springs are all alike, and people burst forth with them. The summer he wishes heat mattered, when he lays out under it watching the sky pass him by. There is much of the world to bypass and be passed by from.
The season all swirl in a happenstance, half seen and half overlooked.
They aren't a background to his life, or a linear map.
They're just echoes of another life not his now.
The same with cities and states.
It is a beginning when notice's that his human memories, ever grey and slight, have become slighter. He's sure there was something about sunshine, the heat of summer sun, on his skin, somewhere, sometime.
He wonders if he should be angry at it. He can trace all of Esme's earliest memories of this world, and the ones that came before this life for her, can remember all of Carlisle's shared memories, both of his life and of Edward's own life seen through Carlisle's eyes, with more clarity than those slipping from his ability to recall personally.
It is harder to be angry about something no one can control, even if it seems unfair to be able carry all that is theirs, present and past, when he is denied his own. He has better things to be angry about.
Yet alone, doing as he pleases, when and where he would, the anger fades.
Each day finds him cooler in the place that used to boil, the place that used to burn into him merciless and unceasing, before the lack of impetus to keep it going.
There is a blinding, obliterating, coalescing silence in the world he lives in.
One where a million thoughts choreograph a dance he is the endless, solitary spectator for, without a single half note of silence should he be near to life. And yet silence is the abject and absolute rule in his life now. It is the balance. It is the price. It is the punishment.
There is no other who hears his thoughts, and only his prey hears the few words that ever have cause to leave his mouth now. He's always been taciturn over loquacious, but the overlap of their words into his every thought against the backdrop of his own person self imposed, near vow of silence is impossible to miss. As though the speaking part of him has moved beyond him.
When Edward had taken care of his latest choice -- a sarcastic bartender at an upscale hotel, with his fingers deep into things that left him breaking arms and shooting others for pay; and left Edward with an oddly circular memory of a beloved women with a white flower pinned in her hair and violet eyes, both laughing and crying
-- he'd stolen the man's suit and spent the night in the lobby playing sonata's on their baby grand for the first time since before leaving.
Not four weeks later, he is in Chicago.
(Chicago. Specifically. Looking for things he knows he won't find there. )
He looks regardless -- in the apartment buildings that are now tiny corner offices. The room that is his first memory no longer has the same wall paper or furnishings, but the bound notebook on the desk reminds him of Carlisle's. He stares out the window he'd never looked out, before making a hasty retreat from the entire scene. It's more than a mile when he realizes he's still carrying the notebook.
That it's empty is the only reason he never considers turning around, walking down the sidewalk, with his head tilted downward toward it, turning it over and over, too fast for the poor small minds passing him to see well. Not quite listening, nor ever able to ignore, the comments where they convince themselves it's just a trick of the light or having only seen it out of the corner of their eye.
It's the better part of another day, and another conquest which has left his eyes flared glaring red of the first day again, before Edward is sitting in a tree with a pen, writing the first two sentences that will start a lifelong collection of journals, as the rejection of the entire idea of writing one, which smacks of following in Carlisle's footsteps still.
And still he writes, in slow, painstakingly correct, tilted handwriting --
Today would have been a decade.
I still haven't forgiven him.