Event Horizon (where language fails - towards the end)

Soren, stared at me. “Once you know what it is, love doesn’t wait for you; it finds you where you are.” He looked from me to his wife. “It runs.” They smiled at each other. It’s indescribably unsettling to see happiness when vultures might as well be circling overhead.

“You know Lao that from here, you may still follow us”

“Follow you, to what end? You walk undeviatingly into death.” Something not unlike like laughter moved behind his eyes,

“Death, like cessation?” He said with a tutor’s tone of well meaning clarification, though at the time I thought it hubris.

“And the end?” he continued, “Not yet, it’s just the end of this.” I was taken back with urgent responsibility.

“This is all there is.” How dire could I make my claim? I went on.

“What do you think? That something will come down and stop the war before you have to face it? That you’ll be saved from it somehow? I don‘t want to watch you all die for a delusion.”

“It’s not - ” He started, but I cut him off first. He did seem to mind.

“If you won’t do this for yourself, then your children, don’t throw them away.”

“Do you not see it, even now?”

“See what?”

“Love has come! The war is over!” The crowd erupted behind him so that I had to wait for their noise to die down before I could speak again.

“Love! Are you really going to keep on with that?”

“It’s Love that we’ve been too long separated from, but we will not be forever. It’s close now, it’s so close.”
            “So that’s what you’re after, the fulfillment of this Love?

“It’s already been fulfilled, and don’t confuse yourself with crassness of language. Don’t say things like “this love” or “that love,” there is only one and it’s all that matters.” He paused briefly, the frustration on his face looked strange, now I wonder if it is because it reminded me so greatly of myself.

“I don’t know how to make this clearer than I have, but I guess I’m not the first one saying it: there is nothing but Unconditional Love. Any other manifestation falls short, and though it may be similar in appearance, it is ultimately something else.”

“Are you saying that I did not love my wife, are you saying I don’t love my daughter?”

“I’m saying that Love needs to first be thought of as something that exists before we can know it as something that is done. What you feel towards them may be close to the real thing, if it’s coming from the right place, but ultimately it falls short.”

“So, because I’m not with your processional I don’t know how to care for the people in my life? How the hell can you say that?”

“Don’t tell me what I am saying, you cannot know that. All that I mean is that you’re forgetting the origin. All these other attempts are like light through a prism, yes it’s broken into smaller impurities of what it really is, but that does not change the fact that there is light still there.”

“Look Soren - ” but now he cut me off

“It’s not easy to prove that anything is real, but Love. Once you find it, everything else finally has meaning. Look at me, or at the dirt or Agrona, everything else, it doesn’t matter; all of this, to put it simply, is the love song of a broken heart. It’s been sung from the very beginning, when we were first stolen away in the night. Love wants us back, for its own, again.”

This was sounding desperate, vagaries do that.

But when he turned to me with that look of absolute sincerity, I couldn’t help but doubt myself. It wasn’t until I had found out where Soren had been coming from that I’d really begun to doubt him after all. How long had I trusted him, and how many times had that trust been fulfilled. Was there really a change in him because I’d realized his perspective, or was it a change in me because I’d finally realized my own. Is it madness that makes a man see what others cannot, or is it because the whole world has been blinded? Who am I to say? We are men of secrets and lies.

“I know that you believe you are helping us, but you aren’t. There are things at work here you do not yet understand, but you may before it is over. Your desires are in the right places, and for that there may yet be hope. You were drawn from darkness to the edge of night, that you might see the day waking.”

            Sound pounded over me and I was shaken violently, disoriented, and then realized that the alarm had sounded and Soren was going to be led away, and I too had to leave.