Time to wake up again to the stench of salmon oil. It’s been roughly thirteen years down the drain. Whole lives have been gotten together meanwhile. My so-called peers have experienced the world to their hearts’ content and can now afford to look down on the very opportunities that enabled them to do so in the first place, while I still worship them as my only hope to ever break free and see a tiny fraction of what they’ve already seen. Sintel’s song no longer makes tears well up in my eyes, but only because I’ve grown so numb. “When you see all that I have seen” sounds now like a horrible joke, and I won’t be able to tell love from pride because I’ll never know either. Only my favorite ray tracer seems to have joined me in this drawn-out languor with no end in sight but death. Many other projects have sprung into existence, and most have also died since. Whole nations have been born. I don’t know if this is what was meant by “the winds die”.
A lot has changed, and not just my pronunciation of the fish’s name, or the fact that I’d have never used the word stench at that time.
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The red lake has been forgotten. A dust devil stuns you long enough to shroud forever those last shards of wisdom. The breeze rocking this forlorn wasteland whispers in your ears, “Não resta mais que uma sombra”.