Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.He threw it down as a challenge and I accepted with another until we were shooting nineteenth century barbs back and forth with our imaginist skills, long honed in the boring hot sunshine behind the tents while we waited for showtime, or teardown time, or pay.
~Charles Baudelaire
Baudelaire was one of the greatest translators of Edgar Allan Poe's work into French. Did you know? My very first Poe collection was in French. Lochlan found it on the seat of a booth in a restaurant outside of Montreal on an extended trip and brought it home for me when I was eleven and mostly I used it as a booster seat in the truck until the boredom drove me to read it in the sunshine, for that was the only way I could stand to open it. It smelled like mothballs. A smell I can appreciate now but when I was that age the only thing I wanted to smell was cotton candy or Lochlan's hair after he used my honey shampoo while bathing in the lake.
PJ walked into the kitchen with his coffee and muttered something about being out of his league. That broke the spell and we stopped. Mostly because it takes one of the others to demonstrate precisely how weird and insular we can be. Well, I can be. Lochlan is logical, straightforward and true.
Except that he isn't and that's okay, I think you have a decent picture of him by now. I would post an actual picture if he would let me but he won't. You will be quickly swayed by the easy smile and perpetual beard, and strawberry-red curls that rest behind his shoulders now, a color fading rapidly into gold in the sun. His hair is so long now I bet if he straightened it, it would be longer than mine. But he won't so it's a non-observation.
It still smells like honey, though. And I smell like mothballs because I have been safely stored all these years and pulled out and dusted off rather recently, fitted with fresh batteries and a line-dried pin-tucked dress. When you pull the string in my back, my faded emerald eyes fly open and I repeat tinny brainless phrases such as "I love summer!" and "Someday you'll die and I don't think I could take that!"
Okay, maybe not the second one. Not out loud, anyhow.
(You call me dollface, this is all I can picture anymore, and I'm sorry for that.)