//author note: so i decided to reconsider posting it on aff! i got a request and there's really not much to lose so i'm gna be updating this and my ao3 account. thanks for reading!//

He held his memories like broken glass and a handful of sand. Memories that shouldn’t exist, not now anyway, memories of another that doesn’t belong to him. Pain of a world so far lost and so vibrant to the back of his eye lids.

The warmth and softness, the sun scorching his tanned skin, the silk delicately wrapped around his head. The scarf around his neck, thick and suffocating, his paleness complementing the fluttering snow.

Have you seen it? Night skies filled with lights, thousands and thousands of burning lights setting the darkness alight. It’s nothing in comparison to tall metal buildings with foreboding heights that pillar the sky and replace the stars with empty flickers.

The taste of heat and thirst, the hood of his mouth crumbling like the peeling skin from his lips. The feverish feel of the earth beneath, the deserts reaching on for miles in an endless sea of gold, so much gold. Gold that smells of dry and tastes of bland.

He remembers it all, like a probing nightmare or like a wistful dream- like memories so incredibly vivid, he’d be so sure he had tasted the desert air with his own tongue and felt the high sun coat his skin, but they weren’t his, and they were. There was him in the desert and him on the port, there was him drowning in silks, and him suffocating in the subway.

He is himself, and he is someone else. He was there, and he was not. He is here, and he is not. And if a person could be so sure of the physicality of their reality, to know this was home, that this was the place, this was the time they were meant to be, then he was so sure. He was sure that he was meant to be here, and he was sure he was not always here.

For he remembers the fire eating up the sky, and he remembers the cold of the snow on his cheeks. And if he remembers them both as he had lived twice, thrice, four times, then do they not belong to him?

He’s not sure, we’re not sure, people are rarely sure.

But there was always something he was almost sure of, a person, a girl, a boy, neither. They changed, often, but their eyes were always the same; eyes so deep he could fall into them and float among the clouds pondering questions of the universe, and he wouldn’t feel small, he would never feel small.

And it was always so easy to feel small on this earth.