’tis always good to be home.

So much is lost in the time away, physically or even, you’re beginning to sense more and more, mentally. But you are here now. Unlace your shoes, unroll your socks. Unplug the world, uncork the wine, unpeel your soul, for this is your home, this your cabin your hearth and your quietude this the life away from life—the respite. You know full well that the life lonesome is the life grander.

Take a few days to enjoy this quietude, gaining back some lost energies, a squirrel to your acorns. A delicious warmth of relaxation spreads through you with each sip of time and space…

… but, and damnit, soon enough, slowly, irrevocably, the agitas begins its return. A few times a day you catch yourself looking out the window—for what? One evening, you open TikTok and can’t help but read all the exciting rigmarole.

Don’t give into the restlessness this time. Wait. Remember: the last time you went out you died many times over? Gruesome deaths, too. Drowned and stabbed and burned and one time even the night’s stars looked down at you coldly and that might have been the worst injury of all. What’d you ever do to the stars?

Don’t go. Stay awhile. Consider perhaps this alternative:

You are lying in the dark stand that morning on the sill having pulled the door gently to behind you. You lean back against the door with bowed head making ready to set out. By the time you open your eyes your feet have disappeared and the skirts of your greatcoat come to rest on the surface of the snow. The dark scene seems lit from below. You see yourself at that last outset leaning against the door with closed eyes waiting for the word from you to go. You? To be gone. Then the snowlit scene. You lie in the dark with closed eyes and see yourself there as described making ready to strike out and away across the expanse of light. You hear against the click of the door pulled gently to and at the silence before the steps can start. Next thing you are on your way across the white pasture afrolic with lambs in spring and strewn with red placentae. Gross, flies and all. You take the course you always take which is a beeline for the gab or ragged point in the quickset that forms the western fringe. Thither from your entering the pasture you need normally from eighteen hundred to two thousand paces depending on your humour and the state of the ground. You have been here been there been here before. You know the stepcount don’t you. Your Fitbit tracks ever carefully. But on this last morning many more steps will be necessary. Many many more. The beeline is so familiar to your feet that if necessary they could keep to it and you sightless with error on arrival of not more than a few feet north or south. And indeed without any such necessity unless from within this is what they normally do and not only here. Them being feet which walk. For your advance if not with closed eyes though this often as not at least with them fixed on the momentary ground before your feet. That is all of nature you have seen. Via the sockéd toes. Since you finally bowed your head. The fleeting ground before your feet. From time to time. You do not count your steps any more. For the simple reason they number each day the same. Average day in day out the same. The way being always the same. The same saming same.

What do you do?

You keep count of the days and every tenth night you multiply. And add. Your father’s shade is not with you any more. It fell out long ago. You do not hear your twin’s footfalls any more. As if there were no other any more. Where there were in fact no other ever any more. You. Just you. For you there is no other any more. You used never to halt except to make your reckoning. So as to plod on from nought anew. This need removed as have seen there is none in theory to halt any more. Save perhaps a moment at the outermost point. To gather yourself together for the return. Cabin respite, then back to the fools of the world, you can’t help it no one can. And yet you do. As never before. Not for tiredness. You are no more tired now than you always were. Not because of age what of it. You are no older now than you always were. No older than your other always was. As no older that you always will be. Who is stronger? You are the one the same. And yet you halt as never before. So that the same hundred yards you used to cover in a matter of three to four minutes may now take you anything from fifteen to twenty. Old man! The foot falls unbidden in midstep or next for lift cleaves to the ground bringing the body to a stand. Then a speechlessness whereof the gist, Can they go on? Or better, Shall they go on. The barest gist. Because you forgot your socks. Get it. Stilled when finally as always hitherto they do the feet.

Quiet now.

Quietly—quiet.

You lie in the dark with closed eyes and see the full scene. As you could not at the time. The dark cope of sky. The dazzling land. You at a standstill in the midst. The quarterboots sunk to the tops. The skirts of the greatcoat resting on the snow. In the old bowed head in the old block hat speechless misgiving. Halfway across the pasture on your beeline to the gap. The unerring feet fast. You look behind you as you could not then and see their trail. A great swerve. Withershins. Almost as if all at once the heart too heavy. In the end too heavy.

Here you be. You have reached this place. Go on. Turn the page to wherever or whatever. The book is in your hands after all. Is after all your hands.

It is for you to decide. Go on, I said. Do it. Do what pleases you.

(Nothing: it is, after all, one clarifying option.)

END