He sits on the bench, and the world goes by.
They are wrong; there are not nine winds, but dozens, each of which he tastes during the course of that changeable day. Damp airs off the water, soothing, but the breeze and the gale distant cousins at best. And when the air dries, the harmattan blasting him with fine grit that settles even in his sluggish eyelashes. It feels like a new enemy every time it changes direction, scourging a different part of him.
For a moment he thinks of the prayer.
Tempest shake me,
Blast remake me;
Earthly tarnish
Scoured by storm-
But She is not his, after all. Or perhaps, more correctly, he is not Hers. There is another star-
No. He won't think about that.
He sits, and he draws the blanket closer, and eventually his eyes stop stinging.
The sea holds a thousand colors, too, shifting like gemstones, tumbled in light. He likes blues and greens; they are never too much to look at, not even when the sunlight catches fire to the waves. But they have a way of pulling you in, those kind of colors, especially as the sun goes down to rippling violet. Those are colors you could disappear in, colors like ink to write you over, write you out-
Something stings in his chest (familiar), then blooms with warmth (strange).
He won't think about the sea, either, then.
Mostly he is thinking of nothing at all, anyway. He is a woven thing, one thread stretching out into the unknowable darkness - no. A necklace, snapping, and as it unravels his thoughts slide down it like shining little beads. Perhaps they make a sound, wherever they fall. The sharp staccato click of glazed and hard-fired clay, too small to shatter.
He cannot bind it up again. The other end is out of reach.
So he sits.
He must be hungry, thirsty, but he struggles to notice those feelings at the best of times. Right now everything feels like the same agglomerated emptiness, and that is much better than the alternative. Except. Wool scratches against his cheek, the coarse blanket. Strands of cat hair tickle. Most days he would find it a constant distraction. Today it is a pleasant reminder that he exists, that he has form and not void, that he is more than a curse walking.
Yes. He is a man, even if he was perhaps not put together right. Even if he is sitting here wishing desperately for someone to take care of him. Jannah. Ziyad. Or... Really, he wants his mother. He is a six and a half foot tall man who wants his mother. He wants to be swept up in her brisk comfort, in the right angles of rules and procedures. Everything she does to make him right again when he has gone wrong.
But she is far away, in Hakleth the ancient city, mother of civilization and font of mystery. While he sits on a bench to which he was forcibly removed for sleeping where he was not welcome, to be as close to the missing part of himself as he could.
This is, perhaps, more wrong than even his indomitable mother could make right.
Still, he sits, watching the last light of the day surrender over the sea. He knows that sooner or later, someone will come along. They will tell him to do something, and like a puppet he will obey. There will be a momentum generated by continuing to go through the motions, and eventually he will blink and find himself properly back inside his own skin. All that is needed is the initial spark. Somehow, he has friends enough now to know someone will provide it.
Until then, he sits.
It is just another day.