Chapter Text
Your blank meditation on the white paint of the ceiling is interrupted as the couch at your side dips and Dazai deposits himself on the seat and leans into your frame causally. Attention thus shifting, you take notice of the book that’s held popped open in his hands, and immediately frown. He on the other hand, placidly sifts through the page till he finds the one tiny poem sitting at the corner of page 121, and turns to you, his breath fanning your jawline.
“Hey, this one’s so beautiful.”
And you take in the words printed on the page, and recognise the poem over which his fingers run now, almost caressing the words, as if caressing not what you’ve written but you, yourself. Putting the cup down, you decide to join your fingers to his, and wonder out loud, half sceptical, half amused,
“Is it?” In response, Dazai hums, but his attention doesn’t waver and he stares at that page, at the words, and his frame leans further comfortably into yours; you make space, shifting around on the couch, so that his head ultimately ends up lying on your lap.
“It is,” he answers wondrously. “It’s not the really the technique I think, there are ones with prettier phrases and heavier meanings in here, but this one….almost feels like you. It’s like you’re reaching out through the words.”
The light in his eyes dances, and the softness lining the creases of his face as he takes in each line, each word over and over again, makes you think of the way he looks a you, or you look at him sometimes, at the end of nights, or start of days. The words twirl in his head, some sing, and some like a sad storytellers, just narrate things that he knows he hasn’t heard from your lips at least. So like you, and yet he has never heard you utter a word of the emotion that the poem contains. In front of his eyes, the hands open, fingers unfurl, the flower, withered, sitting atop your palm comes into view, and then dropping the flower onto his lap, you reach out. You hand is running in mazes through his hairs, and Dazai thinks he should voice this concern out.
“You’ve never said these things to me.”
There’s no accusation in his voice, no sadness, but simply an innocent observations. Here, your line of thinking finds its end, and with voice equally neutral as his you tell—
“It’s not easy to put everything into words. I don’t know how to say, what to say.”
His fingertips still glide over the page, yours try untangling the knots that have formed in his hair. To translate what lives inside your heart—part screams, part songs, part fire, part waters of the ocean—is not really a task that you believe you can carry out, if not in the language of your vulnerability, that is literature. If asked, how you create what you create, you answer will be exactly the same as the one you’ve just given Dazai. You don’t know. It’s the way you process what goes on inside you.
“I love this one,” he breathes, before closing the book and putting it away. You let your touch drift to his face, and while you draw absentminded patterns over his forehead, he goes on, “and I know. I know not all things can be said like that….I know.”
Of course he knows. If he doesn’t know, and if he doesn’t understand, who really will?
“Read to me” The request falls off from his mouth and instantly you smile. Reaching out for the book, skim through to find one, that just like the one before, contain words that translate the thoughts, emotions that are otherwise translatable. Not knowing how to say the things that live inside you, but there’s at least one way to weave music out of that chaos, incoherence, and now, he’s asking you to sing. It’s not a serenade, but you put honesty in the gaps and pauses between the words read out loud, while he listens, eyes closed. Your fingertips press kisses on the on the love in his lips.