Written on the Dark

Men and women live with a heart-deep uncertainty every morning when they wake. It is why they go to war, why they write poems, fall in and out of love, plan thefts on dark nights, or try to forestall them. Why they pray. Or refuse to pray. It is the uncertainty that shapes and defines our lives. The tears of the world, a longing for joy. Or even just safety. Just that.

It seems to me that most moments in a life can be called interludes: following something, preceding something. Carrying us forward, with our needs and nature and desires, as we move through our time. It also seems to me that it is foolish to try to comprehend all that happens to us, let alone understand the world.

Sometimes we retain the quiet moments that come in the midst of chaos, of ager it. The city, my city in the night. Our lives, written on the dark.

We regard our own memories as truths, when they are often just the stories we have told ourselves over time. They become the truth we live by, or with. They become our lives.

Usually there are no headstones for the dead of a battlefield. Sometimes a mound is raised. What we know, or decide we know, of the past needs to be judiciously weighed and measured. It rarely is. We have our allegiances, even when centuries have gone by, season after season, year after year after year. —

He ended up having a different sort of life, however. Who can know where and when storms will crash upon us, or what slanting sunbeams, as at summer twilight, might illuminate our lives?

the words one chose were a way of seeing

He didn’t intend to just die and drift away. Might happen, but it wasn’t his plan.

Because if you love something too much, you can be destroyed if you lose it,