Interim
I could use my crusader's passion to outline the reasons and ways in which the world is wrong and I am right. I could pedantically peel away your fallacies and assumptions until you have nothing left and are forced to examine every incoming thought and idea lest it adhere itself to your flayed skin and infect the deeper parts of you with its poison. (After all, it's what I had to do to myself.) I could recite the stories of how you hurt me - how everyone and everything has hurt me - over and over like an Ancient Mariner of juvenile seas.
But really, what crusade is there left for me? The passionate anger-fire doesn't come as easily now. It is tempered by love - more abundant and yet quieter by far than I could have anticipated. Do I bury a hatchet, or use it to destroy a burnt bridge further? (Neither, I think. Perhaps the only thing to do is to drop the damned thing and watch it as time and the elements do their work.)
What story do I have so far that is worth telling? The full telling of the story must wait, I think, until at least one arc of the story is over. Until then, I will recite it only to myself and to those editors I trust and respect. Until then, I can give only snippets. Teaser trailers of the story I will eventually have enough footage to release.
So here's this.
His bare fingers brushed a single brick. He clasped the wall to steady himself against the push and pull of the place. When, finally, he loosened his grip I took his square hand in mine. His fingers retained the cold and damp of the brick wall as though, for just a moment, a part of him had become a part of it. We stood, side by side, gazing up at the winter sky darkening around the high-peaked roof of a place he had once called home. Fog condensed on our faces and rolled down our cheeks - more on his than on mine. We didn't say a word to each other. There was nothing that needed to be said.
In the space between the end of one journey and the beginning of another, what is there to say that would be better, more eloquent, than silence? What is there to do that could accomplish more than absolute stillness? There would be time enough to talk on the road.
We got in the car, fixed our gaze on the standard - "PENSKE" writ large and black and bold on a yellow field - that would lead the caravan through five states, and he started to drive.
But really, what crusade is there left for me? The passionate anger-fire doesn't come as easily now. It is tempered by love - more abundant and yet quieter by far than I could have anticipated. Do I bury a hatchet, or use it to destroy a burnt bridge further? (Neither, I think. Perhaps the only thing to do is to drop the damned thing and watch it as time and the elements do their work.)
What story do I have so far that is worth telling? The full telling of the story must wait, I think, until at least one arc of the story is over. Until then, I will recite it only to myself and to those editors I trust and respect. Until then, I can give only snippets. Teaser trailers of the story I will eventually have enough footage to release.
So here's this.
His bare fingers brushed a single brick. He clasped the wall to steady himself against the push and pull of the place. When, finally, he loosened his grip I took his square hand in mine. His fingers retained the cold and damp of the brick wall as though, for just a moment, a part of him had become a part of it. We stood, side by side, gazing up at the winter sky darkening around the high-peaked roof of a place he had once called home. Fog condensed on our faces and rolled down our cheeks - more on his than on mine. We didn't say a word to each other. There was nothing that needed to be said.
In the space between the end of one journey and the beginning of another, what is there to say that would be better, more eloquent, than silence? What is there to do that could accomplish more than absolute stillness? There would be time enough to talk on the road.
We got in the car, fixed our gaze on the standard - "PENSKE" writ large and black and bold on a yellow field - that would lead the caravan through five states, and he started to drive.