Floating Intellect: Becket

Becket was the first of my four "Floating Intellect" characters, but also the most difficult to write. When I originally put this piece to paper several months ago, I was unhappy with it: I didn't--and still don't--think it captured his internal dialogue. It is, in fact, more of a character sketch. However, I recently came back to this and couldn't help smile at how true a sketch it is. I took nothing away from the original, any editing included additions.  

No matter how many times he saw her, it was like seeing her for the first time. The eyes always got him first: deep, clear, sea-green fringed by long, straight, dark lashes against even-toned olive skin. Aside from their apparent aesthetic beauty, her eyes contained a certain liveliness like the first days of spring after a harsh winter; an expressiveness reflective of the passionate undertones she gave every pursuit, action, or thought. He saw the world obscurely, stepping outside of and removing himself from everything in his observations. The world always seemed a little distorted, like he was looking at it through a glass bottle, or a fog had rolled in and made it hazy, or forever gray as the result of eternally-overcast skies; and then she walked into the frame with her eyes, clear and bright. 

She looked sharp against the fuzzy world, a sketch in pen right in the center of a watercolor. If his world looked overcast, it wasn't due to clouds, but because she carried the sun within her--a lamp in his unclear landscape; a Jacques-Louis David or a Leutze, rich colors, clean lines, and clear scenes to his Dali or Escher, surreal and distorted into a labyrinth for the mind. Where everything felt to him like a hazy dream, she stood out in crisp reality, a vision within a vision. Her eyes always stood out the most, beacons of life and clarity, he felt himself powerless against the gravity of them, caught in the orbit of their atmosphere. When she entered a room, even if he did not face her, he could feel the direction of her gaze like one feels the world suddenly get lighter when the sun breaks through for the first time on  a cloudy day. 

So many times he wished her gaze might be directed at him. So many times he imagined her eyes alive with feeling at the sight of him. So many times he had imagined looking with passion and adoration and longing into her eyes and having those same emotions returned with equal fire. He imagined the conversations--long, intellectualized, philosophical--they would share; deigning--no, daring--to daydream about his thoughts embodying themselves and stepping down the steps of his fantasies outside the walls of his mind to walk back into his life in her form and figure. 

That was it, the apex of his existence: the idea of having her--the only thing, person, place in this world who actually existed to him--to exist with him, to make life real for him, to finally be realized with all his senses and not just fabricated in his mind. For now, however, she existed only in his writings and sketchings. He lived flesh, bone, and blood in his internal sphere surrounded by a miasmic atmosphere of no substance, no clarity, no shape--punctuated only by her presence as equally flesh, blood, and bone as his own. If only he could conflate their two spheres, like two bubbles or clouds, morphing into one another to create their own world...

But he was only a Pygmalion without at Aphrodite, his apotheosis in front of him with no way to melt away the stone.