A
woman had come to save his soul and he wasn’t sure he was ready. Afterall hadn’t
he, for the past decade or so, found plenty of ways to put readiness
off to just around the corner, while convincing himself that he was closing in
on it? Isn’t that why he had volunteered for this transfer to this forsaken
place, beyond civilisation, in the third world where it was others who needed
saving? And he… well, he could be exactly as he was.
He
had reached a kind of happiness – or if not happiness then a compromise - between
who he was, who he’d like to be and who he really was. This required a complicated
balancing act that he would never have been able to explain. And it was all
possible because he was here, living the life of an expat in a foreign country,
in a tiny sliver of space being part of it and not being part of it, both
inside and out at the same time. It was all part of the magic that this, paradoxically,
gave him a much more luxurious lifestyle, with more privileges and more status,
than the locals could ever dream of.
This
woman now, with her simple, straight and annoyingly unshakable sense of what it
means to be saved – or not saved – threatened to cast a different light on the
whole thing. Like when you find out the trick in an optical illusion.
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