It was at the precise moment at which a sickly moon emerged from a cluster of undernourished clouds that I alighted on the rail just outside of the woman’s window.
I had done so just as a whisper of wind had stirred a skinny wreath of flowers and lighted bulbs that now absently clanked against the narrow frame.
The universe sighed as the indifference of the world offered itself up yet again unto the night.
Everything was as it was intended to be.
In a world in which intent bears little if any advantage over blind chance.
I had not been this close to the woman since that other war…
All those years before…
And now, a new one in which our shadow selves are bathed in the blood of the innocent for our tired human need to dominate and spread…
Like disease.
It all felt so…
Natural.
As if the events of both our lives and the winds themselves had conspired to bring me there…
Just then…
As if Truth itself had become manifest within…
A moment.
The winds rose again and swirled violently in and around the webs we weave in our fleeting times…
Like a chorus.
A frail, wayward little bird alighted at my side upon the rail…
Each of us gripping tightly against the wind.
We regarded one another with interest for a spell, and then…
As if we had come to some unspoken understanding…
To live.
We both turned to regard the woman in the window.
I had come a long way to be at that place.
I had come a long way…
Thousands and thousands of miles…
Years…
Space…
Just to see her again.
She was looking off into the distance…
Seemingly someplace there, herself.
The heavy earth beneath the rail and the structure that sheltered her trembled.
Had I come to greet her?
To embrace her as one does another with whom one has…
Transcended?
Had I come to embrace her as a fellow human being mired in the marathon of miseries inflicted or overcome?
Or…
Had I come to look her in the eyes far and deep…
As I choked the life out of her?
The lamplight in her room flickered, and then there resounded in that same distance the thunderous drone of mortar fire.
I regarded the little bird once more.
I took a letter from my cloak and held it fast in my fist.
The woman, Nadja, was now standing at the mirror that was pressed against the frail wall a few feet from the window.
She was wearing a skirt with the side clasp hanging open, and her brassiere.
She brushed her long blond hair methodically…
The sky-blue eyes that I remembered so well now cast unto some other frame of the infinite.
She seemed as alone as I had ever known her…
As if I had truly known her at all.
But these wars…
And the things we people do to survive them…
They take a toll…
On the soul.
I thought of the words that were written in the letter I held in my hands…
And I wondered…
Would it be more satisfying for me to kill her…
Or to simply greet her and then walk away…
And leave her to this…
Life.
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