Darius

a character sketch

He sits quietly in the dark, because the light hurts his eyes. He doesn't like light that hurts his eyes. He doesn't like people that hurt his heart. He has a fragile heart, but a complicated one. He doesn't like rebuilding it. It takes far too long.

His room is small and dark because the curtains are always closed. He doesn't like them open. They remind him of sunlight when they're open, even though they're too dusty to see through. He has a card table for his solitaire, a lonely boy's game, and a dusty boom box and a stack of dusty cassettes. He is caught in a past that he can't even remember.

He has a bookshelf with a dictionary, because he likes big words. He has a couple Shakespeare books, because he likes the way poetry sound on his tongue, and the big words they have. There is a apple core, and a few dead flies.

He has a bed that folds out of the wall, and it is piled high with all his musty dusty papers.

He sits at his card table, shuffling a deck of cards, murmuring words to Shakespeare’s sonnets that he's memorized and trying to calm himself down. He wonders to himself if he has gone crazy. Has he? Deep breaths, in out. He starts humming along to some antique songs from his trusty cassettes, that are playing, barely audible, in the corner.

He is a disaster, but a beautiful one, and his silence speaks louder than his words. He walks around in circles loving scarcely but passionately, with all of his fragile heart and soul. He kisses them on the eyelids and tells the worrying ones not to, because he is not going anywhere. His smile is underused, but it's heaven to touch.

He is full of mannerisms, like twisting the little silver ring he wears on his pinky and muttering poetry and biting on his knuckle and shuffling his deck of cards and tugging at his earlobe. He is an emotionalist, a secret lover, an artist, and a hostage on his own account, holing himself up against the world, because he doesn't like to get hurt. But is he only hurting himself more? he muses as he turns up his boom box a notch and begins humming along as he starts another game of solitaire.