For the hundredth time before kissing ink to paper, she reflects on the necessity of what she is about to do. Which is basically, to exercise a passion in a world where most passions are untenable luxuries or the most vilified crimes. More pressing tasks that need attending to presents itself in a frieze—the care of wilting flowers, how to affect a more sprightly step, the art of winning a political debate, data gathering, making tiny acts of justice out of resolutions. She wonders if the pen need not best retreat to a cage for the simple reason that nobody notices its’ meandering in this city populated with the lost and the wanderlust, carrying cynicism in their blood, that strain that races to outlast hope as its genetic superior. She feels that so many things have been said before and that in the end, all fruits of passion are stripped to the core. No matter how the flesh fares to each taster the seed is finally spat onto the receiving ground at the mercy of the gods of fertility, the gods of history. Yes, she decides, she assents.
“No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes.”
All she wants is to wake up one day nursing a garden that has been good to her, that has been good to the people.
