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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| Day 3: “‘Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.” — Hamlet, Shakespeare A hush lay over the town as the clock struck one. The lamp posts bored their brittle yellow light into puddles that slept like dark mirrors on the cobbles. I walked the lane between the old church and the railway yard, where the air smelled of damp stone and old regrets. The town slept, but the night was awake, knitting its own quiet mischief around the corners of every house. I had come to the churchyard with no ambition beyond a walk to steady a mind tangled by a day of small misfortunes. The service lights inside the church flickered once, then steadied, as if the building itself exhaled and found patience. The iron gate gave a sigh as I pushed it—more rust than hinge, more memory than metal. The ground beneath the yews felt like something breathless, waiting to be named. The air grew thick with something unspoken, the way a crowd suddenly falls silent when someone begins to speak a truth no one wants to hear. A whisper skittered along the headstones, like moths dislodging from a lamp, and then a voice—soft, unfamiliar, almost polite—drifted from the far corner. It simply asked, in a cadence that suggested years of listening: "What are you seeking tonight?" "Hope," I finally said. The voice answered, "Hope is a stubborn thing. It lingers where fear has laid its threads." The presence drifted closer, cool as rain on a fevered brow. It was a reminder that stories do not end at the grave, they merely pause, listening for a listener who might hear them again. "Do you hear it?" the voice asked, almost tenderly. "The phrase that never leaves us, the sentence we mold into our own survival?" I turned away from the lime tree. The church bells in the distance were not loud; their sound was a memory in motion, a reminder that time, though it spills and erodes, also gathers, and gathers again. The contagion of the world, as the line has it, travels through breath and sound and small kindnesses, not through fear, but through the stubborn, stubborn insistence that life continues, even when the world is listening to its own heartbeats. The churchyard remained, quiet and watchful, but I felt the tremor of something repaired within me—an unspoken debt paid in the currency of dawn, a vow made in the shadow of a grave to greet the day with a more compassionate gaze. And when the first pale light of morning threaded its way through the town, I found myself smiling at the ordinary. The world breathed again, and so did I. |
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