The today show

Time stretched thin like an impassable red line the world had set for oblivion. Dreams of the past laid flaccid in the ditch of history; dreams of the future, immovable like never ending defiant ranges of merciless peaks. Stranded between, a man, his mercy, and a compass left in the desert to unearth a feeble spring, a thin blue line stretching from yesterday into tomorrow. But now, curtains asunder, N is standing amused and scrutinizing the audience from the right corner of the dusty moaning stage. Their faces tell the whole story, luminous and hopeful, brimming with confidence and choking emotions, like first timers, blinded by the spotlights, mesmerized by the rustling folds of velvety, blue curtains trimmed with faded gold adornments all around. Apart, the conclave of the regulars attending show just to atone or entertain the disconcerting shadows of a single notion, a line, a monologue.

Faces and gazes, grins and gestures...

G never smiles and can't relax. Lost in her labyrinthic thoughts she squints and groans and decidedly declaims the devil in the immensity of details. " The good has sunken; the wrong is light and fluffy, blanketing the world... It's us and them, below and up, question or exclamation, zero or one". Few seem to listen, none to get it. A slicing thought jams her orderly mind: " The strings have broken. Music has died." .

A's face is long yet kind. The gravitas of the betrayed and yet defiant royal: staunch, unforgiving, focused, and determined. To fight the fight. On her face, the brewing storm, in her voice, the rolling thunder, in her eyes, an unredeemable happiness and a long- forgotten lightness of being. She cannot listen, but when she speaks she lets it out, softly: " I've only tried to save my daughter..."  Her cheeks, fallen and parched; she conceals the imminence of tragedy in her smoky eye shades. She cannot help but wonder: " Where did that extra beat come from?" When did hard luck soften? How did we get here and when will we finally reach there?"  She'd welcome some answers now, only to find reason to discard those answers she was already dealt. Yet, she knew she was right. She knew that fight was the just option; wrestle the specter, keep the pages turning, while pondering incessantly at both the depth and breadth of scourge. " Beauty is in the soul of the beholder ", she thought. Beauty is elsewhere.