When the World Goes Quiet

by Gian Sardar

Sometimes fault is also like a wind. It slips into cracks and fills spaces.

Isn’t it wonderful, when what someone perceives is even better than what’s there?

The painting was a promise: Your world doesn’t need to be the one others see.

Cobblestones and brick. Moss and violets. Bruges used to be a dreamer’s city, with daffodils and tulips in window boxes and weeping willows whose boughs skimmed the water of the canals that vein the city. A fairy-tale land of medieval buildings and winding narrow roads, as well as shimmering water and bridges where couples stood to cast wishes into the air, the reflection below them a glossy, inverted world of red-tile rooftops and trees and white clouds scattered in cornflower-blue skies.

“Right and wrong—those ideas not only depend on who tells the story, but on when the story stops. Or when it starts. Wouldn’t you agree? Not everyone gets the full picture. When you’re in the midst of something, it’s hard to see that.

Do not dwell. Head down, feet forward, don’t think. And so we pull the blanket of numbness tight around our shoulders, August says. August, a writer prone to useless musings.

Anger is something she’s only started to embrace. To be angry, you must feel. You must grasp the magnitude of loss or injustice—and she’s not ready for that. Not completely. Not yet. Only

Before the war, life was so easy. So good. And they never knew. They never knew how lucky they were, that they could walk, just to walk. To feel the air along the canals. To see their friends and stop to admire lacemakers and chocolatiers. Restaurants were packed, sauces rich and thick. Plates left behind, piled with food. So much food, scraped into bins. And they didn’t know. They didn’t know what a privilege it was, to throw things away and to linger on bridges. To not be asked to do impossible things,

life is repetitive. Maybe it’s the journey humans need. But every so often, a war or a plague or what have you. A hundred years pass, and our streets look different, so different that we think we’re nothing like the people who came before us. Our situations, our circumstances, they’re all new. They must be, we think, because we’re so different. We want to be different. But at the core, everything’s the same. A hundred years ago, two hundred years ago. The same lessons learned differently. And no matter when it is, you can guarantee something’s waiting in the wings to make us feel broken, but more importantly, to force us to find a way through.”

Maybe the real casualty of war is right and wrong. Even the belief that there is a right and wrong.

“Lord knows we’re all so different. Each one of us. And it’s exhausting and it’s trying, but you ask anybody and our truths are the same: we want what’s best for the people we love. We just get there differently.”

how much depends on not just who tells the story, but on when the story starts, because life is layered upon life, and nothing is simple. Fluctuations and faults and lies that are a kindness. Green that is not grass and blue that is not sky. Ends that in fact could be beginnings.