The sun is not yet fully manifest...
In the sky...
I align myself with shadow as best I can...
That I might remain...
Unseen.
The bitter winds swirl and tiny flakes of snow and ash from the ruin all about wet my face.
The black bird at my side on the rail regards me with something that may have approached...
Pity.
My thoughts return once more to the woman whom I presume to be slowly waking beyond the war torn walls that divide us.
I remember all too well how she feels...
How she tastes...
I understand better the little bird's pity for me.
It occurs to me that the twenty odd years that I've lived since last I...
Tasted her...
Were like some half-life...
Or if not a half-life, then some crass and sustained experimentation in causality and consequence.
But that cycle, if it could indeed be deemed as such, had been set into its dire motion as a result of a single grace offered...
And spurned.
I closed my eyes and thought of something that Anton...
A mutual friend of Billings and mine whom we had reencountered those weeks prior in Salzburg...
Had said in response to the Day Three Conference Theme: "Globalisation and the European Debt to Morality."
The idea was that as a result of myriad atrocities that had gone before...
As a result of war or merely human sickness...
Displacement...
Trafficking...
Ukraine or Moldova...
In the Balkans...
The two World Wars...
Innumerable conflagrations and tiny cuts at the veils of both humanity and spirituality; whether healing or damning in and of themselves...
The point the organisers of the event were trying to make was that no matter the cost; both economically and societally...
Europe's borders needed to remain open to ensure at least the chance of providing refuge to those from other parts of the world who were in desperate and mortal need.
When the speaker on the stage had said those words aloud, Billings, Anton, and I had all taken a long sip of our drinks and indeed, there was a sense of those in attendance having been rendered collectively agog.
Horrifying scenes of famine and violence occurring in detainment camps hastily erected near port and land border crossing points across Europe appeared randomly and furiously on the massive monitors that had been mounted on walls and arches all over the smokey hall.
After a moment I muttered to my friends,
"I suppose it's like Camus used to say, 'Freedom is nothing more to a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst."
Anton choked on his drink.
"Fuck Camus. Have you seen what's happening to the European demographic? We are witnessing arguably history's most significant 'peaceful' infiltration...
Invasion...
No, it's more than that...
It's an infestation...
And I emphasise 'witnessing,' because we're sure as hell not doing anything about it."
Billings dragged his cigarette.
"Harsh, but you're not wrong."
And though I said nothing in that moment, I was thinking the same thing then as I am now...
Freezing on this rail...
That it was sadly...
Fatefully...
Pitifully...
A result of all of those tried and true human failures...
War...
Oppression...
Exploitation...
And on and on...
That I had met Nadija in the first place.
It was as a result of all those things...
And the choices that both she and I had made up to that point...
And since...
That I find myself stationed on this iron rail outside her window now...
Obscured within the greater malaise of war and the absurd...
Afflicted by a throbbing erection and thoughts of ideal...
As day begins to coalesce into some semblance of...
Being.
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