July 2026





            Christopher Golde’ looked long and hard into the mirror. He searched for some semblance of his former youth.

          'There was his green eyes. They were still green,' he thought.

            He turned his head from side to side. He would often stare into the mirror-like this these days. He secretly hoped to catch a glimpse of his former good looks, not that he would ever admit to being so vain. Youth now seemed a distant memory and it depressed him.

            He was eighty next month and he remembered quite clearly thinking to himself at seventy that he was afraid of the day when he would be so old he would be useless to anyone. He had once written about Jason King in the same way, staring into a mirror and rueing the day he would be too old.

Jason may have been just a character he had invented, but sometimes it seemed to him that Jason was more alive than he was. Just like Jason, he had always struggled to cope with and accept the change that time demands of all humans. Neither of them was good at accepting mortality, or even the concept that they were, in fact, both mortal. 

            Jason had vested in him the knowledge that the human mind was nothing more than a factory for thought, and just as he had created Jason, it seemed that in turn Jason had most likely created him. Between them, and the rest of humanity, a world now existed that would, in turn, bring order to chaos. He knew that old souls like his and Jason's carried with age, responsibility and knowledge that was sometimes burdensome.

         He knew he was no Jason King, but he also knew he must finish this final novel. The world needed to understand and prepare. The knowledge he would impasse would give them the confidence to survive. He knew all too well there was much adversity to come. After all, the more humanity could imagine, the more it would be challenged by its own creations.

Christopher looked away from the mirror and walked over to the balcony of his apartment. He opened the sliding door and hot air greeted him with a searing blast. He stepped outside of the conditioned apartment and felt the intense heat of the raw sun on his balding head.

Walking slowly over to the large well cushioned outdoor lounge he stopped, turned and then lowered himself down. Looking out over the ocean, he thought about Jason's love for both Pietta and Julie. He remembered his own loves which now seemed so long ago. A longing to see both the women he had loved caused him to sigh. He hated sighing. He had no doubt both would again cross his path in the next life but he also knew that although they might feel a strange attraction for each other, they would never remember what they had shared with him in this life.

He wondered if there was any amount of love that could break this anomaly of time. He knew better than anyone else, anything was possible and that nothing was too strange to be impossible.

 

 

        Sursum Corda

Christopher Golde