The girl doesn't have much romantic experience, but her love flutters like a hummingbird's heart. And her innocence does her no harm.

THE GOOD MAN

I walk up to the old tree, where the one who called himself THE GOOD MAN stands. He has his long eyes hooded and holds the Eucharist behind his broken knuckles. He stares the stare of repentance.

I do not want to surrender my will. I could deny him. I could run down to the fields below, that beauty I've known all my life. But THE GOOD MAN's words are too exotic, too careful, and too enticing.

I have been told all my life, "beware THE GOOD MAN, those who deem themselves worthy are rarely honest".

It is easy remember the times when I have failed. I've ruined others too, and they haunt me like ghosts. But in my dreams I know that I don't really regret people or times, I only regret myself. And now, I have given myself up to THE GOOD MAN.

THE GOOD MAN had looked like he would reassure me forever.

LOOKING-GLASS-ME

Now I know his promise is not the most important thing. Reassurance and comfort are fleeting, a reflection of truth. When we see reflections, we may find shelter in their certainty. Fooled into thinking the reflection is the thing itself.

All beginnings are these reflections. Beginnings are primordial forms of a developing whole, and they lucidly describe what they will someday grow into. There is uncertainty in beginnings, but comfort too.

I only recognise beginnings long after the thing has begun. LOOKING-GLASS-ME found himself being reflected, which meant that one of us had already begun to look.

And that is certain.

BURDEN OF GOD

"But you promised me the answers!" I cry to THE GOOD MAN from a distance. But he does not acknowledge me. Deep down, I know that I did not believe our pact when we had first made it.

She is isolated from the world. Who could expect the girl to know the ancient mysteries, long known and kept?

Though in not-knowing, there is some other way of seeing. Like hearing an unknown language spoken aloud, and you do not hear the meaning. Only music.

What if I knew the future and the past? Would I still see the art of living each day? Or would it all look the same, a perfect and macrocosmic whole. THE GOOD MAN promised me omniscience, to knock away the innocence of ignorance.

But who should know the language of GOD? And who would really want to, if they knew. He can not hear the music he wrote.

That is the BURDEN OF GOD.

BEGINNING

Is it glamour, this blindness of beauty? Or is it ordinary? The WHORE said, what is beauty is what you do not know why, and what is normal, is the language you know too well. And to the WHORE, there is not so much beauty. Not so much innocence.

But even the WHORE knows the comfort of beginnings.