[TM] 213: Sorrow
Jan. 18th, 2008 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
changehistory"There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it." -- E.M.Forster, A Room With A View.
It's everywhere now, he thinks, feeling it press down around him. Women weep, their sons and husbands victims of this or that push for power, victims of the greed of men they will never see, victims of a god who calls for the blood of the innocent. Their lives, bodies, hearts, souls, ripped apart by the punishing thrusts of men inside of them, around them, tearing apart the fabric of who they are, were, would have been.
Screams rip the air, the night, and only some of them come from him, jerked awake by dreams that leave him cold with drying sweat and tears. It's too much, the suffering, the quiet aftermath that settles when the pain is gone, and there is only the memory of what was to fuel the grief that follows loss.
He can't think of what might have been. He can't focus on picking at scabs to watch them bleed, creating a new wound over the one that tried to heal. It will drive him mad to second-guess and relentlessly rehash regrets that revive when he thinks of them, faces lost in the mist of memory and time and mistake. One action here, another there, a different turn in this place, a road not taken down one direction...he can see them all tracing back through his past, but each stings like acid poured over skin to mingle with blood, burning and raising a new scar if he lets it, so he doesn't. He shuts those thoughts off, closes those avenues of assumptions. There's enough to deal with now, with this. If he lets himself...he could lose himself in those, and that will serve no one, least of all him.
So he concentrates on now, on the things he can fix, the worlds he can change, the lives he can rearrange, and with a sigh, and perhaps a few tears, tries to let go of those he cannot.
It's everywhere now, he thinks, feeling it press down around him. Women weep, their sons and husbands victims of this or that push for power, victims of the greed of men they will never see, victims of a god who calls for the blood of the innocent. Their lives, bodies, hearts, souls, ripped apart by the punishing thrusts of men inside of them, around them, tearing apart the fabric of who they are, were, would have been.
Screams rip the air, the night, and only some of them come from him, jerked awake by dreams that leave him cold with drying sweat and tears. It's too much, the suffering, the quiet aftermath that settles when the pain is gone, and there is only the memory of what was to fuel the grief that follows loss.
He can't think of what might have been. He can't focus on picking at scabs to watch them bleed, creating a new wound over the one that tried to heal. It will drive him mad to second-guess and relentlessly rehash regrets that revive when he thinks of them, faces lost in the mist of memory and time and mistake. One action here, another there, a different turn in this place, a road not taken down one direction...he can see them all tracing back through his past, but each stings like acid poured over skin to mingle with blood, burning and raising a new scar if he lets it, so he doesn't. He shuts those thoughts off, closes those avenues of assumptions. There's enough to deal with now, with this. If he lets himself...he could lose himself in those, and that will serve no one, least of all him.
So he concentrates on now, on the things he can fix, the worlds he can change, the lives he can rearrange, and with a sigh, and perhaps a few tears, tries to let go of those he cannot.
