"I fell in love with the idea of human sensation, you see. I couldn't, no I couldn't give it up. And you can't imagine, you take it all for granted - it's yours by right so you never think: the pleasures of touch and taste. Your skin alone - your skin affords you such - rapture! ... To eat a peach, picked straight from the tree and warmed by the autumn sun, to bite a crisp apple - the first juice - a revelation - or to feel the sun on bare skin. Salt! Salt! ... Salt on a fresh-laid egg, boiled for four minutes, or to lick fresh, human sweat. ... Let me feel - let me go on feeling..."
- Carmody Braque from The Changeover by Margaret Mahy
This book was a random find, picked out of a fifty cent bin years ago, but even as I grow older I find solace, comfort, and challenges in its pages. These lines stood out for me starkly even years ago (on the same level as Erik's final cries in The Phantom Of the Opera from the Book: "She kissed me, right here on my forehead. She kissed me, and she did not die!") as a pure cry of the desire for connection and sensation, and the lengths people will go to in order to achieve it, as well as what they will give up having achieved it. Both Carmody Braque and Erik/The Opera Ghost are villains, barred from legitimate human sensation and connection due to their own actions, and I think that's part of what draws me to these final cries; in my heart I want to believe there is no one beyond redemption, while in my mind I know redemption is far less important than stopping those who harm from doing so.
( Other Single Frame Stories Here. )
Credits:
Skin: De La Soul
Eyelids: Slink
Hair: Wasabi Pills
Lipstick: Mock
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