I awake almost as an afterthought as the train ripples along the expressionless seeming track.
I absently wipe drool from my cheek.
I look out beyond the window to my left to see that the landscape is fading...
Not resolving.
It fades into some half-state of manifestation...
Someplace between my thoughts and...
Where we are.
All of us...
On this train...
Speeding past everything...
Everyone...
And nothing...
At all.
One wonders at that which one truly has or has not...
Overcome.
My friend's woman used to say to us both that we had "seen and experienced too much to ever be healed again...
The only thing left for one's such as you is to apply the simple truth of what you have witnessed...
And live a better life...
Treat people better...
Because you can...
And you know...
Better."
I am on my way to see my friend...
Anton.
His beloved Anja is now passed...
Away.
And we are left to try to apply some modicum of the goodness and perspective that she brought to him, and by extension...
To me.
But one also wonders...
In those all too pervasive moments when the light of those we love is not felt...
To what extent we are capable of harnessing, channeling, and applying any of that ineffable grace that they wear so effortlessly...
As a second skin...
When such grace...
For all those things that we have witnessed...
And experienced...
Seems...
Alien....
Unattainable...
And if attained...
Certainly...
Unsustainable.
The conversation had actually begun between me and Anton years earlier at the side of a mass gravesite near the border of Serbia and Bosnia.
He had been lecturing me yet again about the importance of objectivity...
Of detachment...
In journalism, and indeed in life.
Of course, this was long before he had met and fallen in love with Anja.
Back then, I had simply nodded in acknowledgment of his words without any real attachment to their meaning...
Ironically...
I had turned to regard a woman who had shaken off two security officers to descend into the pit.
She struggled desperately, sifting through the remains of those that were...
Lives that were...
Here...
In hopes of finding something...
Anything that remained...
Of her love.
I turned away.
"I understand what you're saying but how does one remain objective to that?"
Anton shrugged.
"One simply does."
"No," I said.
And that's when my most fundamental, existential problem truly manifested in my life.
I realised that I simply care...
Too much...
And despite my fervent wish that it could be otherwise...
Despite my endless attempts at looking at life through a Stoic lens that protects me from too much pain, I simply could...
Not.
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