no emotion that's worth having

SAMUEL i am the ocean, crawling madly at your moon. and with one wanton whoop — The routine was beginning to settle in again. It was odd how quickly it happened, Sam finding that somewhere in the weeks after his return to the Hollowed Grounds, he went from feeling out of place and strange to feeling once more like this was his home, the once-familiar streets showing themselves to him again and life in the Grounds returning to being his own. Occasionally he would remember his time in Torchline, which now almost felt like a dream that ended a nightmare; his heart did ache for the beach and the friends he'd made there. It had been a great shame how he had had to leave, deserting Zeph, Milo, Vervain...but he had had no choice given the situation. He tried to tell himself that every time, but it was hard to resist the temptation of thinking that one day, he might go back (though the face of James, which inevitably appeared in these daydreams, was the best deterrent he could imagine). These thoughts often occurred as he did something monotonous and easy to drift away while he was doing, like dusting down the shelves. The books needed to be removed, the shelf wiped down front and back then the books themselves, then everything replaced; it wasn't uncommon for him to become completely enraptured with his thoughts during this process and finding at some point, hours later, that the shelves were clean. Humming something tuneless to himself absentmindedly, he was beginning to move the books back into the shelves, hardly in the bookstore in his mind, considering places he had been and where he had yet to go. — i melt into a sycophantic soup, & all that's left to do, is giggle, fawn, and swoon.