On Love and Desire | ✔

3 | and i love you

CHAPTER THREE - and i love you

With the exception of himself and Mercy, the streets were devoid of people. There was no one around them in the middle of living out their own separate lives. No one was busy with things to worry about. There were no curious dogs to walk with leashes, no strollers to push for the sake of tiny poop machines, no dangling earbuds nor heavy earrings to be wary of as a jogger, no honk or bell of a passing bike. Not even the occasional hum of a car. And there was no one to sit and yap on the poorly painted wooden benches for sure.

It didn't mean that the streets weren't loud, though.

The wind whispered funny words to the grass, trees, and scattered litter, and the greens responded with giggles as their leaves brushed against one another. The scattered litter took it to the next level, as always, and knocked themselves over with the loudest laughs an inanimate thing could do, especially since the litter included cans and bottles. Sometimes, when the wind chose to be a tad bit louder, the clueless fronts of both the parking and stop signs crumbled. They wholeheartedly allowed themselves to give in to the silly jokes of the cool wind and chortled with the very core of their being, every single part, with little to no regard to the loose screws that barely held their heavy, bulky selves together.

Then there was the constant buzz that the wind failed to overpower when its jokes' punchlines failed to land or hit on things. All the buzz from the controlled electricity that coursed through the wires of the streetlights and telephone poles caught Desmond's attention easily. The bright white lights from the streetlights themselves had their own type of buzz as well, but it was a mean-spirited one. It happened in the eyes. If he dared to look anywhere near them— it didn't matter whether he tried his best to avoid the glow of their bulbs (or rather, the heart) or not— his eyes would quickly come to burn and screech in pain. The buzz (and sizzles, even) would come from the light, to his eyeballs, and stomp their way out of his ears with taunts and curses. Those bright sons of bitches were borderline blinding.

Not in this particular night since he was with Mercy and all, but every now and then when he walked on his own and was on "autopilot mode;" a state where no significant thought in his brain would form and he failed to pay attention to his body, he would catch his own lips letting three to five screeches out at once from the bare sight of the sun's rays. Or some other direct source of light his eyes happened to come across.

Clearly, Desmond couldn't handle stuff that bothered his eyes all that well. He'd say they were sensitive if there was a way to medically describe what the hell was wrong with them, but he'd already talked with an eye doctor about that and she said he was alright. His moms thought he was just being dramatic when he made the appointment for it but he was glad that he at least tried to figure it out. For all he knew now, it was psychological.

Whatever the case, he handled bright stuff a whole lot less... let's say, smoothly, than noise. The fact that he wore noise-canceling earbuds almost every waking moment of every day when he didn't have his headphones on to tune out the loudness of the world with video games or random documentaries said a lot. He was able to accommodate for noise far more than what he desperately needed help for. He always waved it off with the passive thought that he could address it the next day. The next day would always come and go.

On the bright side, with Mercy around, he never needed to worry about that issue. She picked up on that fact early on in their friendship. She always brought a pair of dollar-store sunglasses with her whenever they hung out from the odd pile of junk, or "trinkets," as she insisted for them to be called, under her bed.

Now that he thought about it, did doing such a thing for him pass as her enabling him on his lack of self-care for his bright lights problem? He was always with her. Oh nah, he didn't need to put much thought to it. He could just shrug it off and consider it his subconscious solution to the problem... which, yes── is why he was ever so grateful to have Mercy there to help.