Time

Life’s start is often very simple. Samuel was born in a quiet room. He remembers that his mother hummed a tune, which she said years later she never remembered learning. His father had a habit of watching the clock, forever measuring time in tasks and expectations. Being an Air Traffic Controller, perhaps he was driven by his obsessive clock habit.

Sam’s childhood came with scraped knees on playgrounds where laughter and cruelty shared the same swing set. He learned early on that teachers taught well the letters and words, but often not how to speak truth.

He grew, not in straight lines, but in spirals where the curious and reckless, sometimes wise, sometimes hollow, experience stacked his inquiring mind with more questions than answers. Sometimes wise, sometimes hollow. There were bruises no one knew of, words that cut deeper than fists, followed by moments when silence was the only safe place.

As his reading improved and his brain demanded more, bringing even more questions that often grew into arguments with the world and how it presented itself, incessantly telling him what to believe.

College opened new doors with some leading to knowledge and others to arrogance. Some to love.

She was there with innocent eyes like open windows. Her voice made him forget how alone he had felt. What followed was an experience with little caution. They moved in together, shared toothpaste, fought over dishwashing, learned the choreography of compromise, and graduated into marriage.

This new commitment evolved like a sunrise, not sudden, but irrevocable. Children followed, each one a mirror, each one a mystery for the child and for Sam. He remembered his parents and how they had tried, how they had failed, but, oh, how they loved. Each other and their son in ways only he understood, for in his new chapter of life, he was becoming them.

Then…

He chose danger. Not for glory, but for a truth he was haunted by. Why so much war? Becoming a journalist in lands where truth was a currency too often counterfeited, he placed himself in war zones, holding his documented stories like fragile glass, and wrote in his notebooks with trembling hands as he outlined what he was learning about lives unraveling. He saw much of death before it saw him.

He learned the name of fear, the still, and he stayed in his vulnerable responsibility.

One day, a man with no name and too much hate ended Sam's story. No warning. No last word. Just silence.

Destiny, who had been keeping close watch all his life, finally stepped forward. Not cruel. Not kind. Just inevitable. He had done with his life what he could until his destiny was revealed.