In the Waning Light

by Loreth Anne White

“We are not dispassionate viewers of the world. Witnesses and detectives are heavily influenced by what they expect to see, what they want to see, and what they actually see. The more ambiguous the latter, the more influential the first two. Similarly, what we remember depends upon what we believe—the human mind is not an objective recorder of information . . .”

the ghosts of the past perpetually whispering just below the skin of the present.

How you made big shiny goals when you were young, and how life turns out misshapen in the end. How people settled. Found a comfort zone. Or a rut that just kept on getting deeper, and harder to climb out of.

But her so-called self-indulgence, her cutting everyone out of her life, had been an act of survival, not the act of a victim. It took courage. Not cowardice.

The thing about love, Blake mused, watching his brother, is that it came in so many colors, so many guises, and it could hold both small and enormous power. It could move one to do extraordinary things . . . like keep secrets against better judgment, just to keep someone safe.

acceptance is at the heart of love. Differences are what make the world a wonderful place.

The fog thickened as the clock ticked inexorably down toward 4:00 a.m., a time when the biorhythmic ebb of the human cycle dipped to its lowest, a time of night when it was most likely for a death to occur in the very old, or very ill. A time when temperatures fell to their lowest, just before dawn, and currents of air stirred across the earth, and it became easy for the grim reaper to reach through that fragile membrane that separates life from death, and crook a finger to softly summon a soul.

When you relinquished life, you relinquished your own story, the ability to tell it, shape it the way you wanted the world to see it.

Mostly I take the Jungian view that we create the idea of monsters in order to externalize the bad that potentially lurks within us all, and we call this monster a devil, or beast, so we can examine it objectively, without having to see the beast in our own eyes when we look into the mirror.”

“I guess we never know where the danger will come from,” he said, eyes on his son. “Sometimes it’s close to home. Or even right in the home. All we can do is our best to protect our children, the ones we love.”

Charles Dickens once said that “Home” is simply a name, a word, but it’s a strong one; stronger than any magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration. And when I saw Blake again after we thought he’d died, as I held his son’s hand in that hospital room, I finally understood how, sometimes, “Home” is not a place. It’s a person . . .