Outside the light

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I’d overheard them talking in a pub. O’Reilly’s, if it matters. Wondering what it would be like to hike through the forest, from the river to the lake.

I’d quietly said “that’s not such a good idea”. I had thought I’d spoken under my breath. My mistake, getting involved. Trying to stop the inevitable. You’d think I would learn. Questions poured out like ale from an overturned mug. Ridicule, when I told them that they would be better off in the pub, or their own beds.

“How do you know”, asked the apparent leader, a thin tall kid named Josh. “Just take my word for it”, I replied. “You have no idea of the things that live in there”.

“Like what”, he demanded. “How do you know? Have you been there? I could see the nods from the group, five girls, four males, all just over the legal age from what I could tell. Must have been college students, so sure were they of themselves and the rightness of their beliefs. You can tell. Nothing had happened to make them doubt themselves, or, what their limpid, swishy, pasty faced instructors had told them. All of it pronounced from the lectern with the sureness of an edict from on high.

I was once like them. Not so very long ago.

Five hundred years. Five hundred years. Even when I say it to myself, a long time. Seems long anyway. Seven lifetimes ago, and yet it remains as vivid in my mind as if it happened this morning.