When the bombs started falling, I put on my leather, pulled my cap low, and went a-walking, alone. Perfect golden day, trees painted with fire, cloudless sky promising Winter. You don’t have to walk far around here before you lose the traffic sounds to birdsong and the chuck of squirrels and the nip-stiffening wind from the North.
There used to be a clearing in the pines, with a ramshackle fire-ring (you had to be careful cos there were always loads of broken bottles around) and a big tree we would climb when we were kids. Twenty years. But the paths were all overgrown, and I couldn’t find the way, though I rambled for what seemed like hours.
This war feels like a personal affront: if this war is happening, then everything I have believed—about faith, and the essential goodness of human nature, and the inherent justice of the universe—must be wrong. I am lonely, and scared, and mad as hell—but more than these I am grieving, grieving deep for something lost.
