Midnight Philodendron

I. The Eyes of Parvati

Their love was the feeling of walking through an empty grocery store at three o'clock in the morning. It was riding a shopping cart through the night, when the sky above you was such an intensely dark blue, you could feel the most profoundly infinite space stretching out all around you. It was the world's most sacred unspoken wisdom, passed along in a silent glance. It was the feeling of walking in empty places, and wondering for just a moment whether or not you truly are the only two people in the world for an instant. It was a collision of two lonely worlds, slamming into each other, and binding the souls of planets.

The two were soul mates eternal, introducing vibrant, unseen colors into each others hearts. But as far as he knew, the two existed only in a painting that Caesar had pulled his paint brush away from for a moment. He was in a bit of a rut with the painting, and to be perfectly frank, his lack of sleep was helping very little. Each brush stroke in the past hour had seemed so agonizingly slow, and he was so very tired but sleep was reluctant to come to him this morning. He had been up working since nine in the evening, and had gotten home around six in the morning, but sleep would not come. So as the man had listened to the birds outside chitter away at a volume that seemed impossibly loud, he resolved to paint.

Caesar Singh stared at the couple he was painting, but it was the woman that was giving him trouble. He was painting a modernized Shiva and Parvati, an endearing portrait of fated love, but their faces eluded him. He stared into the space were Parvati's oil paint eyes should be, frustrated. Her face was at the back of his mind, like a woman he had met in a dream whose features melted away the moment he woke up. Shiva was a bit easier to depict, with his azure skin and confident grin, but the tenderness of Parvati's loving gaze was beyond Caesar's grasp.

He closed his own eyes for a moment, trying desperately to pull the woman's face out of the void, but it would not come. Perhaps it was his lack of sleep, or perhaps it was the lack of genuine inspiration. Regardless, Caesar would be getting no further with the piece today, so he resolved to clean up his studio for the time being and make something of the day.

He stood, and reached over to put on a new shirt that wouldn't be covered in paint. The truth was, no such sweater existed in his closet, but there was a sweater which had very minimal splotches. He tugged a thick, olive sweatshirt over his head which only had a few yellow spots at the wrists and stepped into some worn loafers. Since he simply needed to run a few errands, he didn't bother with shaving or taming his loose, dark curls, but simply made his way out of the door.

Caesar thought of things he needed to get today, he could only afford the necessities like butter, noodles, coconut oil, and cinnamon. In truth, his kitchen could do with a lot more, but he was strapped for cash. He had very little motivation to cook much more than plain noodles these days either, though he had always been a man of simple tastes.

Pulling himself out of the house and away from his painting was easy, incredibly easy, but it also felt like he was pulling himself away from the one thing his soul seemed to cling to like a magnet. Caesar had never really been the most religious type, but he found an immense comfort in painting Hindu figures. It was his own form of puja, of connecting with his heritage. He could easily spend hours, almost in a trance-like state, contemplating the images of his idols, of Ganesha or Shiva or Lakshmi, and translating them onto a canvas.

Today however, Caesar could not afford to lose himself in a painting. Today, he had errands to run, so it was a trip to a local food mart for him.

When he wasn't painting, Caesar worked night shifts at a corporate grocery store. It was soul sucking, exhausting, mind numbing work. As such, he tried to avoid getting his groceries from his job whenever possible, so instead, today he was making a trip to a small neighborhood co-op. The food quality wasn't always the best, and the peanut butter was almost certainly overpriced, but it was a much cozier place than his work.

The man found himself drifting in and out of thought as he made his way from his house, to his car, to the aisles of Terra Cottage. He was tired, and his steps were practically dragging, but he was also restless. There was a sharp alertness to his mind which he knew meant he would be getting no rest any time soon.

Finding what he needed in this store was easy. It was the kind of place that rarely changed. He was certain that if he were to not set foot in that store for twenty years, he would still know exactly where to look the moment he returned. It was a cozy, homely place, and he hardly needed any awareness while he walked.

Or so he thought.

Not paying the slightest bit of attention, Caesar stumbled into a woman and accidentally dropped a jar of coconut oil on her foot.

The string of swears that followed was more than enough to jolt him back to reality as the woman dropped to the floor to clutch her foot. Incredibly embarrassed, he bent down and joined her near the floor as he retrieved his jar. He wanted nothing more than to avoid her gaze and run from the store in that moment, to mutter some half-assed excuse about how tired he was, but he also didn't want to make another Dick Move™️, so Caesar brought his eyes up to meet hers and face his blunder.

Only, her eyes left him speechless. Though she looked as tired as he felt, her eyes had an incredible warmth to them. They were an intense amber in the morning light, a dark honey. Redwood tree bark illuminated by the golden hour at sunrise. Her almond eyes were framed by impossibly long eyelashes, and a brow furrowed in pain and frustration as she clutched her foot and stared at him incredulously. Her long, dark, wavy hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and where the sun illuminated the top of her head, she seemed to glow.

She was scowling at him, but for half a second, he felt like he might've known her for a thousand years.