Use This Time to Gather Strength

Well, then. He didn't trust anyone. There had been too much deceit. The catastrophe was imminent. The roses were born. We were born. There was a new triumph. He tried hard every day. The peace kept crawling through the fabric of things, around him. The let us be, the moments we ignored, the triumph of raised hooves pummelling the air, cries of victory, a medieval march, voices of the poor.

Here they were the voices of suburbanites, separated out into their houses, each little square a parochial universe, a place to squander and live out in dismal certitude, a tiny thing, our lives are a mist and then we are gone, as the Stoics said, and here, here, if we wait for visitation, if we wait for love, f we wait to be embraced, then nothing will happen and we die in our own regrets, untrammelled, unfulfilled.

And so it was they said: Be Not Afraid. 

And he wandered inside his own life. And those certitudes all faded away. And he was grasped with a different sense of time, as if every day a moment, as if everything in fast forward, as if something was done and forgotten as soon as it happened, as if there were no libraries of the soul, as if the present, with the beauty of the lake in the early morning, the fish jumping on still water, old friends fading into history, the past, the regrets, the things that forced the separation of the soul and the body, the moments of extreme regret, well it was over now. 

He took an active interest. He looked out and about and became involved. The parks were coated with children, and young families were everywhere, and he wandered, if not quite as lonely as a cloud, at least separate from their lives. 

This was an area of comfort. This was not the city slums, the red light districts, the true desperation of strung out mornings, of alcohol and drugs and finely tuned madness, but a period of rebuilding. Use this time to gather your strength, the spirits had told him, and so it was, and so it would be. Use this time to gather strength.