Mystery Finally Claims Us

"My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer some quiet benediction and call it the end.  But truth won't allow it.  Because there is no end, happy or otherwise.  Nothing is fixed, nothing is solved.  The facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of conclusion.  Mystery finally claims us.  Who are we?  Where do we go?  The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story.  There is no tidiness.  Blame it on the human heart.  One way or another, it seems we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows.  Our whereabouts are uncertain.  All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark there is only maybe."

-Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

February 2014