recurrence part two

Sunlight at the window pane somehow makes it feel alright...

The fact of ephemeral joy and persistent suffering...

It's all alright...

For now.

Cross kissed the woman's temple and arose from the bed.

She opened her eyes and wondered vaguely at what went before...

And then she smiled.

Cross stood naked at the window and thought to himself that he oughtn't have pushed Billings the way that he had...

The night before.

People's ideas and opinions diverge constantly.

It is simply the way of the world.

But Billings had pressed him.

Billings had invoked the pain of what had occurred in Bosnia...

And so the old debate...

Recurred.

The woman asked him from the deep of the room and some other frame of being whether he wanted coffee.

"No, thank you. I'll get something myself," he said over his shoulder...

Sunlight kissing skin.

But it wasn't the warmth that he craved.

It wasn't the world that he dreamed.

There was a war, and a cavernous element at its core...

And there he had been, yet again, being condemned the night before by his friend for trying to help someone...

Against the laws of journalistic objectivity.

Those two words were somehow abhorrent to Cross, because he did not believe for a second that Billings' notion of objectivity was exclusive to journalism...

He simply didn't want to feel a thing...

And so perhaps out of frustration, or defiance...

Cross had challenged him...

To actually be a living, breathing, hoping, bleeding human being.

"What," Billings had countered.

"You want me to invest hope in a prostitute, give her a lot of money to help her build a future for her and her children... free of it... the blight... and then be eviscerated when she takes the money to go whore in another part of the absurdity this living is?

Is that your idea for me?

For the world?

It's been tried before, my boy...

Likely countless times...

It has been tried.

Put your faith in others and learn what real pain is.

Thank you, but no.

I shall remain an objective, ancillary character amid this tumultuous telling of our times."

But Cross wouldn't have it.

"Thereby perpetuating the problem. Is that what you want?

You know how these days people finally ascribe a modicum of blame to the silent ones across history who observed the worst, and never said or did anything to stop it?

Do you know that even though this notion is held aloft like some badge of generational progress, or human becoming, people like you still don't do a fucking thing... even on the simplest, individual level to extend your hand to someone in need and effect a fucking change for the better?

However fleeting the improvement...

If we can be condemned to a reality of only fleeting joys, can we not optimise and prioritise the goodness and kindness we can render?"

Billings regarded him with a cold, calculating objectivity...

"Am I then to evaluate the veracity of your ideas on the basis of the fervent deluge of profanity by means of which you convey it?"

Cross couldn't help but laugh.

He took another sip of his whisky.

"Fair enough, my friend. 

I'm simply trying to reach something inside of you...

Some faint trace of the boy that once lived between those ears and within that heart.

Didn't it resonate with you as a kid that if you treat the person in front of you well, then that person can take that grace forward and it can thus be propagated across the world?

Did it not resonate with you as a kid that if you don't try, nothing good can ever happen?

Nothing.

Cross was then called back unto the sunlit half-life of the room by the sound of a closing door.

He turned from the window.

The woman was gone.

And the debate between him and Billings had well and truly...

Recurred.