What Would Be My Reward?

And at last there is a break in the dreary forecast. Sunlight streams in through my early morning windows, thaws the quiet city block, warms the homeless collective on the corner. The river teems with people, how averse this disease has taught us to be to one another, how uncomfortable the presence of life. The newspaper tries to explain it interviewing survivors of war torn cities, how long it takes to forget the sniper heavy streets, the idea that life is now and maybe never else. Somehow we are being collectively traumatized, slowly turned over a spit with the heat turned up and we didn't realize when we stepped on and strapped in that we were settling in for permanent scarring.

In my home country, they are building the bonfires, ready to burn out the ends of winter and sing in the coming of spring. But it's only weather. It's only the little ember that carries us through months of darkness, ready to spark into life at the drop of a match, at the say the word and we may bloom again. It's only hope.

Don't worry so much about the scars, my dear, they are no more your life than the rest. We are born to suffer.

But no more than we are to thrive.