#and there’s a bitter tang to this cake but it only heightens the sweetness

[phoenixkaptain]

Sometimes I reimmerse myself in Moomins and I can’t recall what I was going through but I remember the emotions that sparked from these characters. There was a sense of, “ah-ha.” And part of that was from watching the stop-motion version before anything else because I was recommended it on YouTube randomly, if I recally correctly, and part of it was that I was very into Hannibal at the time and Mads Mikkelsen playing Sniff will never not be funny and there was something so pleasing about little adventures where the importance was solely based on the characters and their desire to adventure.

And part of it was Snufkin and Moomin, because I couldn’t help but long for that type of relationship. One in which you think fondly of each other when you’re apart. You can spend hours watching clouds or listening to a river or simply talking about nothing and yet you still don’t get bored. The physical affection is brief, but the emotional affection is so tangible as to become physical. They are a sail on a boat, flowers in a vase; they don’t need each other they want each other. In a very “I could have been made for something else, but I chose it to be you” sort of way.

There was no greater romance, in my mind at the time. There was nothing more romantic than simply being reminded of someone by looking at something that person enjoys, or wondering what someone is thinking or doing, or simply. Waiting and being waited for. As Orpheus can’t resist the urge to look at Eurydice, Snufkin and Moomin both can’t resist the urge to know, to learn about, to love each other.

It may be romantic or it may be platonic or it may be interpreted differently by every single person who sees them, but it is, to me, the type of relationship I long to have. Not quite romance, more than friendship, different from siblings, everyone you know assumes that you know where the other is at all times… it’s something soft and delicate, fragile and sweet, and it was so different from romances I had read about in the past.

I suppose one could say that there’s a reason I love couples who laugh with each other, who take time to smile, who talk about meaningless trivialities, who are content just to lay side by side, feeling the wind and the grass and listening to the trees and the birds. It’s so full of yearning, so bittersweet, so hopefully pining, so carefully cradling. It enraptured me then, and it enraptures me even now.