There’s something romantic about a cup of coffee early in the morning, something enticing about the Corinthian pillars supporting the roof above my head. Sunlight peeks through glass windows, a lover, waking in bed with a fluttering of eyelids before distantly whispering “hello”. My only love lies in the hills outside my fortress, in the breezy summer air and the books on my shelves, detailing men pretending to be monsters, gods, and angels.
Knowledge is a shadow, a silhouette of truth. In my reveries I chase their darkness, their elusive selves, burying myself in paper coffins and ink headstones. The floral wallpaper is perfect, eternal. It does not chip. It does not rot. There’s a mahogany desk in my library, like all the ones I’ve read of, beautiful and serene even with the stacks of paper lying around it. The wooden floorboards sing depending on where you step, and every time they do a musician rises from their grave to give a post-mortem performance. There’s a violin on the coffee table in the living room, sitting in front of a red couch, staring at the fire. I cannot play the violin. It is a symbol of my daydreams, of a world witnessed only in my quiet moments—a dream, simply, that can never and will never be recreated in life.
This is the closest to heaven I’ll ever reach.
A church lies outside near the countryside where I lived, and it taunts me. It dictates happiness, as if happiness had its own set of rules. I remain in my fortress. Sundays are filled only with books, nothing more, nothing less. I look, endlessly, as if I’ll find God in Frankenstein or virtue in Crime and Punishment. My journey is eternal. That’s the way it should be. Truth is not found in a series of books compiled more than twenty centuries ago; it is found in the days, in the words between pages, in the variable of an equation. We’ll look. We’ll find it only in death. Even Plato couldn’t fully put reality to words.
But I don’t mean to find a reality. I mean to live in dream.
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