☁ : Describe how they would spend a stormy, overcast/rainy day.
Prior to and following his time in Bedlam and the plantation, Thomas’ ideal method of dealing with rainy days involves reading – sometimes even writing – before a fire run low behind the grate, giving off more heat than light. Hours spent on the couch, or even wrapped up in a blanket on the floor, lost in the pages of other people’s ideas is – and has always been – his idea of paradise.
Of course, prior to the traumatic events he underwent, such luxury as this could not always be afforded what with his burning passion for politics. Rainy days were optimal times for parties and get togethers as everyone wanted to be indoors, gathered together somewhere warm and comfortable where entertainment was readily available and easily maintained. Due to the rarity of his indulgence in privately spent rainy days, they were to Thomas all the more ideal and precious when they were utilized.
Following his ordeal, how often Thomas is capable of indulging himself varies upon his verse and how he has healed – but it does remain his favored method of coping with the rain, regardless of where he is mentally or how he has recovered.
☢ : Describe a thought or dream that would cause them to have a mental meltdown.
Thomas has been a hurricane all his life. Though there have been periods of calm, the eye of the storm always passes into a new barrage of action. When he was young and ambitious, these tempestuous periods of activity would find focus in achieving his goals with passionate discourse and heated debates. Keeping up with him was like chasing a tornado – there was a thrill to be found in following a man who spoke such revolutionary ideals, provided there was never any pressure to commit to the actions they claimed to support by listening to a radical voice of reason.
He was never blind to the thrillseekers – never so naive as to believe that the men and women in his parlor were truly dedicated to his cause. They fancied themselves daring just to be there and he knew it – but it did not stop him from speaking his truth and praying to find the words that would shift the difference between a token presence and someone who truly believed change could be made possible. Though he knew them to be false in their commitments, he had never believed them all to be so false in their friendships – it was not the betrayal of his father that broke Thomas, so much as it was the ease in which the whole world seemed to have abandoned him to it.
No voice rose in his defense, no man or woman took action in any way shape or form to spare him from the horrors of Bedlam, the indignities of the plantation. When he thinks of those days in the parlour, the passions shared in conversation and the dreams voiced in hurried whispers, Thomas finds a Judas in every face. When he thinks of how easily he was written from the world he had once been such a volatile part of, rage consumes him to the point he can barely breathe for the force of it.
Hate is a powerful emotion – one of the hardest to overcome – for it requires the will to let go. Hate does not require forgiveness so much as it does the ability to breathe past the hurt – and for Thomas, it takes years to reach that point. Memories of the good days fill him with bile and fury, are painted so bitter and shallow he cannot see them in a kind light.
The act of healing comes in rebuilding himself from the ground up, for the man he was before brings him no comforts, the man he is now has no individuality left – and the man he becomes always depends on how he decides to direct his hatred and his hurt for all that was done to him, and what little was done for him in any way he could tangibly feel.
Ocean Archive 