#labyrinthofmemory

BOOK SYNOPSIS: Step into this journey of becoming, where the cosmos whispers its secrets, and identity blooms like dawn. This story is an unfolding suite of chapters clarifying my book: The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring: How The universe Sculpted Our Minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness, aware of her need for a body to reveal herself and exercise her wishes, the narrative leads to her birth and the name she will claim: Sunshine. 

Chapter Preface: Between JFK and Jan Smuts, the path blurs—Paris, perhaps, or Brussels lost in a contrail of forgetting. This is the phantom return: not to a place, but to sons waiting behind court orders, to a brother’s embrace, and an ex-wife’s silence. Aetheria guides the descent; Nyx veils the route. In the quiet hum of reunion, the question remains: Who gets to arrive—and who is allowed to stay?

#PhantomFlight, #MemoirInTransit, #FathersAndSons, #LabyrinthOfMemory, #ExileAndArrival, #AcrossContinents, 

YD6-71 (ZA) Phantom Flights Through a Labyrinth, and Boys: Across Continents

Riding on an Aladdin rag, with New York gifts in my luggage, and J.F. Kennedy is long behind. London’s Heathrow—cosmic, deja vu—wide corridors with leading signs that read, ‘Exit.’ The rolling walkway carries me among far-spread travelers. I dawdled in the gleaming wash of the floor slipping past. Then my stride awakens—to walk on. Thoughts trickle of passengers: A brief crossing over the North Sea channel breezes through, then eastward—through France. Eric waits. And faithful to my sister Ingrid, the journey emerged unfeasible.

I’m caught—entangled at the crux—splitting the skies, by a ten-day sleepover nudging Johannesburg into mind. I slogged my calf-bloated suitcase through Heathrow terminus, just as a British Airways flight boarding crossed my path. I jungled through Sabena exigencies—a run to the Foreign Exchange hatch, then back again—before a clean red carbon ticket issued in hand. 

I swore at myself, weaseling through the suffocating crowd, sweating out my original wish for London—booked a year earlier, born in the moment of an idea, walking through Sandton City’s mall where I’d drawn my departure tickets. A launch point to shed Jean and her legal team, piggybacking on my name. But the world has changed—since its needs.

On those end-of-year festive season flights, I seem to shed the worst of life behind. Looking forward carries its own promise—flickering in a labyrinth of crisscrossing journeys: Rio de Janeiro, Tel Aviv, Paris, Brussels. While my body cringes in its seat, mind twiddling. . . doodling in mid-existence, fading behind the boarding pass. 

I’m consuming another summer open-date flight—Paris hovering like a half-consumed destination. Walking the ground, overhead signs flash: a fork blinks. ‘Passengers in transit.’ I just spotted the easy way out of an adventure—but impatience weaves through me. I must wait until the end-of-year to catch my course—saddened that reaching my boys still isn't an option.

The music resonates—a voice breathes, “on the wings of love.” Cosmic, atmospheric—a gauzy spray paints my mind, like traces of Roman roads beneath asphalt. 1961 camouflaged—regretful behind progress. The rural airport has changed over the years. I walk the concrete apron to the terminal, shadows of memory trailing behind.

Across the gleaming corridors, past the grown plate-glass crystal barrier that chokes the passengers at passport control. I taper down the concourse. A carousel, self-service, heaving of luggage—passing under the scrutinous eyes of customs officers. Year after year, I slip through with an outdated computer for Lionel to tinker with. Or Peter Few’s ordered video camera. Now, Gavin's radio. Lionel's printer. I pass, chilled with anticipation of being stopped.

Then—at the whisk of smoked glass—my eyes leap free, held back by a crowd of greetings eyes, eager, but I’m invisible, not their character. Repose my steps, to scan through a crest of eyes and shoulders—fumbling my purse, pecking among the scatter of international coins—a twenty-cent piece. Beneath my search for a phone, a dark-blond boy breaches clear from a gateway of thick sliver tube that holds back the crowds—nearing. In a stroke, his round face shades from his mother, Caroline, to feature my brother Ivo, as a child—but he vanishes beneath my eyelid, as Ivo himself, figures, a head-and-shoulders above, pressing his giant frame through the throng. He emerges—solid, towering.

Cosmic, my words echo, “Hoe wiste U dat?—How did you know I arrived today?” We stroll behind Sheldon, his arms raised, hands steering the trolley stacked with luggage, gliding across a gleaming wash of the floor. From the peeking eye-slit of light—Aetheria's mirage spies on us, bending Helios’ reach to her own whisper. It dawns on me, intuitive: ‘Ilona.’ The usual family telegraph making its rounds, threading whispers through her siblings.

Cautious of the black hollow of the zebra line, but drawn by the surge of white-stepping stones of piano keys, the rhythm of our pace threading through the cast shade. Beyond the edge of the angled concrete columns, tethered to the overhead driveway logic architecture for ‘departure’ traffic—shoved the furthest thing from mind right now. We stepped into Helios at the crest of the day, the asphalt fading beneath the bright blaze of the Highveld summers, blurring the plaza and spilling into a glimmering parking lot beyond a shady curb. Sunlight prickles my face. I turn again to Ivo. “Hoe wiste dat ik vandaag zou komen, Deze morgen?—How did you know I'd come today. This morning?”

Contrary to Ilona’s draping shadow, Ivo echoed: “De M'ma het, gisteravond gebeld en gezegd dat je misschien vandaag op de vlucht zou zijn.──Mother did phone last night, saying you might be on the flight today.” We stepped the pebbled paved plaza down the curb. Ivo and Sheldon, in a breath, debated the parking spot amidst the glitter of glass and sleek undulations of metal. The heel of my steps cushioned in the softened tar, carrying me to the metallic silver-gray Mercedes as its trunk lid lifted. My luggage fluttered at Ivo's hands—like winged—before being stowed into the dark depths. Sheldon's flat palm brought down the trunk shut. We climbed aboard and drove away. 

I gazed through the framing windshield—an extension of a flight—hovering, still seated in the comfort of the Aladdin rug, the magic cloud of my life being tended to. My mind doodled over the airport's intricate roads, drifting from year to year. Only the Holiday Inn tower seems to have gained a moat around its island, and Ivo, justifying the detour, notched to the historic pivot, “Ik sal langst hier. . .—I'll try this way; it’s shorter, I think.”

Steering the car, a fragmented course blotched uncertainties. My seat, no more uncomfortable than in flight, yet my ego—ever surpassing—begged to wrestle doubts. I flipped through them: ‘Am I the only one bugging siblings for a place to lodge?' Squelching guilt as I rode with gifts in my luggage—involuntary to seeing the old year out and the new year in.  

We stopped at the intersection by the road sign, where the traversing thoroughfare was stitched with a dual railway line—shy, peeking against the azure sky. A sketch of convent’s black washing lines—memory strung out to dry—spanning electrified cable punctuated gantries, threads hung from another hemispheric. A gauze of Johannesburg blurring distant—valleys weaseling through the wavy hills—resurges a quarter of a century—more carriage than career—grounding what still hovered.

Exhausted—my spirit still trailing in the jet’s contrail—my brother, a decade my junior and at peace with the landmarks of the present, weasels onto a horseshoe overpass above trickling highway traffic, threading into a suburban street. The wheel coils a turn—into a side road. No sooner, we face a cul-de-sac, a flicker of deja vu—an island in the sky, a recollection of my landing, bright-colored fins shimmering among distant airport structures. He veers counterwise, but no sooner, a gateway to a villa in the sky rises—its eaves shading the fenestrated facade. The car rocks through the gutter and halts on the brick driveway before a green garage door. 

“But! This is not your house.” I exclaimed, thinking he made a courtesy stop.

“Het is thuis”—It is home--we moved. A bigger house. Sold the other.”

Then, Ivo, as if things happen in a flock—among siblings. "Het hele gezin is verhuisd.—The whole family has moved. Ilona to Hazyview, Igor to a smaller house at the far end of Randburg. Kidding me. “Het is al goed. . .—it's good I came to the airport; you wouldn't have found anybody.”

In a half-daze, I stepped to the rear of the car. "Leave it for now, I'm tired," my voice rhymed from behind the monster of my ego, gnawing at the fact that no verbal invitation had been extended to lodge with his family. But Sheldon and Ivo, untroubled, swung my luggage into sunlight. After them, I pressed the trunk lid into its shadowed depth.

Father and son led the way, through a facing gate bathed in the golden haze of an alleyway—wedged between the garage and a precast concrete wall that peeked over the bright white house gable of the house. A side gate swung open, and a pelt of fluff—a puppy—shot between our legs. Meanwhile, the father, an Alsatian, stood poised in the haze that blanketed the green backyard lawns. Ears pricked, alert to Ivo's command. Sheldon couldn’t master the pup’s erratic, wild greeting loops—no shouting could heel him. 

The kitchen window flickers—our reflection slipping past. We turned the corner to a stable door off the patio, Ivo stressing with the bottom leaf to keep the dogs outside. But Aetheria rides Helios’ light, spilling into the kitchen, bending the glare like threads of a mirage. In the shadowy depth, Caroline figures at the stove, steam billowing from simmering pots. Behind her, the two little girls—the smaller one sucking fingers—half-tethered at their mother’s skirt—shy, silent, yet driven by curiosity to welcome the stranger in me.

"Hi! Ivan." Caroline blurted, 

I sink through my knees—bent—tall as my brother is, she’s a little woman. We meet in an uneasy embrace, a brief kiss—her voice resonating: "I'll show you where. . ."

Turning away, Caroline and the girls—Charleen and Sherrilee—slip ahead of me through the gaping doorway of the kitchen. To the far right, Igor and Sheldon's shadows vanish, their presence echoing a narrow passage wall, exchanged in a piped echo—steps in the shadows. 

Until in the distant peeking doorway light, the little crowd jostles—fluttering before a wing of a saucer that dissimulates the planter’s manicured street-front yard. Aetheria’s flavor lingers—in the mirage. Bend in Helios' light, it crosses the shade of the eaves, pleading to the wall’s almost fully waking window, spilling over the trims and windowsill. Silhouettes gathered and bustled, emerging in Sheldon’s room.

"Come now, get out of the way." Caroline, with her Moon in Virgo, resonates with firm authority. Ivo echoes her in fewer, deeper tones. Little shoes scuffled, retreating across the parquet like a small storm pattering behind the blind wall, their echoes piping through the passageway.

A gauzy veil of light cleared to reveal Caroline—needn’t mentioned—the neatness spoke for itself. An inviting bed ran along the lateral wall, dressed in a brown-and-white checkered duvet. An oversized black pillow puffed with quiet pride beside the window’s deep—trimmed folds of gathered drapes.

I sized up the shelves—parked with a collection of scaled-down cars, airplanes, motorbikes. At my feet, on the bare parquet, stood an antique chest. Atop it, a museum piece: a mechanical typewriter, with a few blank sheets neatly stacked beside it. ‘What does a young boy of ten do with a typewriter?’ I wondered—forgetting, for a moment, my own legacy behind De_P’pa, my father’s typewriter. I thought, this is so fantastic. So neat, so precise—a world apart from my school exercise book, a quilt, and an ink pot to dip. “Just a fly’s walk. . .” echoed my teacher’s voice, as I scribbled tracing the faint ruled lines in my exercise book.

Then I turned, throwing a glance toward Caroline and my brother, the last trickle through the gaping doorway. My luggage posed at my feet—an unspoken invitation—lingering in stillness after Sheldon’s reluctance to leave his room. "First things first," I voice, edged with an apologetic reverence—"Can I use the phone to call my boys?" 

"It's in our bedroom, Ivan. Go in, you'll be at ease, to speak with your boys." Caroline’s words resonate like a pointer. "There."

I hesitated before darkness pooling in the angle, the shadows of sentinels juxtaposed at the corner where the passageway veers toward the rear bathroom and toilet doors. In my baffled pause, Caroline’s hand led, swinging the door inward, gesturing behind the door leaf, "There is the phone." 

In my hesitation for a phone in another spot, I sensed the thick atmosphere of intimacy I couldn’t shy from. My mind bruised on the king-size island of a bed—square and soft—in the gloom of drawn thick curtains, cracked with slivers of sunlight. Caroline’s sillage of fresh air trailed behind.

The red phone stared, gleaming rat-eyed, cornered and ready to leap. I snatched the handset—lyrical, a heartbeat, a verse woven into my fingertips, dialing. I turned away from the breeze-swaggering drapes, swung my hips into the cane chair, its creaks rocking me willingly. ‘Isn’t that fun?’ 

I waited, as the distant, muffled ringing stretched thin, tautening my patience.

‘Maybe I dialed the wrong number?’ echoed in my head, nagging. I  redialed, my mind lending itself to the keypad’s rhythm, tracing the 8-0-2—the Kelvin exchange rising from the savanna, as an incantation threaded memory. It rhymed with 5-00-5, the house before the cradle of Lionel and Gavin—but there is no answer.

The reed creaked—lamentably—as I was brought to the verge of anxiety. Flirting with thoughts: ‘If Jean had learned the date of my arrival. . .’ her Sun in Rat, raising her wrath like a storm on the horizon.

I left the chair rocking behind me, and out the gaping doorway. I walked the little wooden block floor, in refrain cosmic music sigh resonating in mind: 

“In the misty moonlight; 

By the flickering firelight; 

Any place is all right;

Long as I'm with you. . .” 

The melody wove into memory—Lionel and Gavin, captivated by those remnants from one of my construction sites. As the afterglow of sunset pressed against the sliding doors, shadows thickened before bedtime. They would balance each piece with careful fingers. Then pause—breaths held—before pulling one free from the bottom to their delight, watching the tower crumble in a cascade of laughter. 

By evening, after another try to reach my boys, I walked a memory map traced by the chevron parquet underfoot, each step an echo of their small hands stacking wooden blocks. I glanced through the gaping kitchen doorway, silent in its shadows. Beyond it, the next juxtaposed yawning doorway, they framed wooden dining furniture hunkered in darkness. Then, came around the wall, distant voices coming to fetch me. I brushed off the lingering stare of lounge upholstery—silent, heavy, watchful—as if shaking off dust from a forgotten room.

I crossed the somber bar-room and paused at the bright thread of light slipping beneath the flagstone step under the archway. Offside, the Alsatians’ sad eyes flickering beyond the glaze—occasional and watchful, begging to enter. Nyx’s dark cloak wrapped their shadows, her gaze lingering behind the glass of the patio’s French doors with wing windows, watching what I saw from my angle. 

Ivo's large arm draped over his chubby little wife, the three siblings twisted by their feet, eyes hovering over the coffee table. Fixated on the flickering colors of the television screen—absorbed in a cartoon’s whimsical chaos.  

I stepped into the limelight—no one perturbed by my intrusion into their cozy leisure. Catching Caroline’s inquisitive glance, I shrugged off the thought, its edges slipping out, gathering into a voice that lingered in the air. “I'll try again, later in the evening.” 

A cosmic rhyme drifted in, unbidden, threading through the stillness: 

“Is it all in the stars tonight?

Is it all in . . . mind? 

That . . . will never come?

A sentimental dream, my feelings based on instinct.” 

The words half-resonate, linger like stardust caught in the fluorescent light.  

Angelic and dozy, the children left for bed, from finding my place besides my brother on the wide couch. "Aren't you tired?" Caroline’s echoes past Ivo’s chest, lingering in the air for the umpteenth time.

"Yes," my breath rolls out, "but if I go to bed now, I won't fall asleep." 

The midnight’s broadcast on SABC flickered, then the screen swarmed with a gray gauze—static. We rose and drifted off, trailing through the passage until the corner doors. With a soft exchange of “Goodnight,” we disappeared into the rooms beyond.

I climbed into bed. ‘Black sheets?’ A breeze from my arrival swept across the black pillow, soothing my head. Who would’ve thought—Nyx—to slip into the arms of Morpheus.

Helios' peeked through the curtain cracks, after the birds had fluttered and chirped, splashing silly among the silent leaves of the bush, before the household awoke. I stirred—cocooned in the covers, weathering out patience.

By nine, I had dozed through worlds—landing, taking flights, checking my next options. My skeptical Warthog lay curled in its lair, while my free-spirited Gemini hovered, lingering for a place to nail myself down, to carve out a career I could bring among the normal—responsible. 

My thoughts drift to Ivo and Caroline's household awakening—tiny footsteps pattering in and out of rooms, warming the milieu after Nyx’s chill. Punctuated by those overriding giant stomps—until frightful, evacuated peace returned through the house. I dressed and went searching for the little family. Helios' glow seeped through the windows, illuminating their scattered silhouette around the kitchen table for breakfast. With hawk's eyes on my wristwatch, holding back for ten o'clock—not to rattle Jean’s feathers that bear upon my boys. 

Caroline offered her phone line, guiding me between the facing archways—opposite an African artist’s hand-whittled bar counter. The somber sideboard cradled a docile beige phone. I dialed, poised, listened to the distant ringing tone, dispatching the Hydra eyes of my mind's familiar craft, settling shyly, embedding the pine ceiling hovering the floor-through entrance. 

Helios' flaring across the north and south yards, glowing against the amber-bullion-glazed entrances. Light threads through the glass, coalescing in the hallway—a golden-bright mirage, suspended in the heart of home. In the shadow pooled by the northern entrance—cradle the phone. 

The line livens, Gavin’s voice chirps like morning's birds fluttering in the leafy swells. "Where are you, dad?" he asked—then fell into a thoughtful hush. 

"In New York," I replied, pausing—waiting for his response. It didn’t come.

"But, Dad. . . you're so clear," Gavin’s voice resonates, feathered with hesitation. I caught the edge of his doubt. I held the silence too long, feeling the pull of his longing.

Extending my tease for Lionel, I shortcut—saddened, leaving Gavin’s little heart adrift, held in that silence, the doubtful sonance of his voice, "but Dad? You're so near." 

"No, Gavy. . . " my voice breathes. "I'm here in South Africa. With Ivo."

A tremor of doubts crept back in his voice. "Are you? Daddy!" Beneath it, a vibrancy—certain in its ebb, his radiant little heart—I felt blossoming inside my chest. Breaking my cruelty, on a breath that reached into the past. "Gavy! How is your tummy?" 

"It's all right. Daddy." 

As this little boy could melt me to tears—puncture my heart—back in New York, when, with the help of his brother, his nightmare emerged, sentient of a flight crash. I sensed the truth unspoken—the cause, untenable: his longing. I had briefed Gavin about London, about the stopover where I’d changed course—rescheduling my flight. 

Then, I heard his peaceful voice rolling and fade through the house: "Lionel. Lionel. . ." 

The line held in a hush. In retrospect, I caught a pressure before an air current from the far playroom—stirring through the architecture, slipping across the lounge’s piled carpet. Footsteps squelch across the embossed Italian ceramics, surge in my mind. Then broke the silence.

"Hi, Dad. Where are you?"

“Lionel! What happened last night?”

"We’re at Granny’s, unpacking the carton boxes. . .” His voice surges to mind—Jean’s mother—then fades just as swiftly, like a distant dream slipping through the edges of wakefulness.

Yet, it was crucial to sense the prevailing temperature in their household. "Lionel," and in another breath. "Go ask your mother if you can come with me to Hazyview. To see Bon'ma and Bom'pa." I hung in suspense on the thin thread of a hollowed line. His spirit in tide and ebb hard to follow in his retreat—withdraw. Tasked with standing up to Jean—lounging, facing the illusion of the past on a television. Flinging over my sentient expectation—bounced back—his voice cracks through the line: "We can only come on Sundays." 

I understood. In Jean's language, that meant; NO.

"Lionel," I loosely insinuate—this isn’t a visit; it’s a sentence. "Go back to your mother. Tell her, "I didn't come from New York to see you on Sundays.” But then I was back on a flight. The skies opened; turbulence gave way to the calm. . . of oblivion. The ridicule of ten-to-five echoed across distant mountains, fading into an atmospheric gray blur, stirring up the past years. In despair, last year, I laid charges at the Bramley police station—anything I could think of: blackmail, extortion, contempt of court—knowing nothing would come of it.

“Lionel,”—“I've kept my side of the agreement all year. I wrote to your mother and made payments to your and Gavin's Bob account. 

Gavin returned, his little voice cutting through the line. "Daddy! My mother doesn't want to let us go with you." 

"Where is Lionel?" I gasped.

"Lionel is inside. He says he doesn't want to talk anymore." 

"Gavy!" I urged, "Go and call him back. Tell him, I promise—no more messages. I just need to explain—." 

A long pause stretched across the line, then Lionel returned. "Yaa?" 

"You shouldn't be in the middle of this"—"I'll speak to Peter.” 

"Peter's gone to Sun City," Lionel sighs. "For seven days." 

"Lionel, don't worry,"—"I'll sort this out. We'll be together for the holidays." The words had just rolled out, that my mind snatched back—an instinctive bank reconciliation, running through the numbers. "Call Gavin." 

When I hooked the handset, I repeated my promise to Gavin—Lionel wouldn’t explain what had happened. The line had gone cold, but I was burning.

I flipped through the White Pages of the telephone directory and dialed the number. “Sun City Hotel,” the native woman answered, then patched me through. The receptionist’s voice returned: "There is nobody." On the edge of her imagination, the hotel's paging system echoes a cosmic rhyme—Mister Few, there is a call for you. Please pick up the phone. Wherever you are. 

I waited—my routed call tracing a path through the homeland, threading across Bophuthatswana's villages of mud huts—how I wished it were so. Instead, from Kempton Park, I reached Hillbrow. Where I used to pick up Janine. I followed her pointing finger, listening to her Jazz, as we slipped onto the asphalt, stretching into the night toward the Magaliesbergs. Headlight vanishing beneath Rustenburg streetlights, before resurging on a stretch, then fading as we weaseled past the glowing parking fields, straight up the hill, and parked alongside Sun City Hotel. The ex-croupier unleashed herself into the casino, swallowed whole by the roulette table.  

"Peter Few," my brother-in-law’s voice broke through, splintering my sense of place. To figure out his pudgy silhouette, short trimmed beard, that telltale hesitation caught behind his breath.  

"You didn't guess it could be me, did you?" as I listen for my reception with this Leo.

"No." Short of breath, his breath short, gasping to match the urgency.

"I've just landed."—"And Jean is up to her usual malice. She won't let me have Lionel and Gavin."

"We're coming back tomorrow afternoon," Peter echoed.

‘Tomorrow?’—floated beyond the distant hills. 

By dusk that following evening, along the graded curb, the Nissan Bakkie came to a halt before the house. I had roamed the shopping center and the streets of Halfway House—impatient—until five to seven. When I pulled into Vorna Valley onto the grassy sidewalk. I peeked across the clinker-brick precast wall, behind which the house’s fenestrated facade sat quiet—its drapes drawn. Off to the side, the driveway was bare.

Headlight splashed against the locked steel-framed wooden gates. Peter unwound the window. "Hi, Peter,"—"Hi, Rita," as she stepped out, cutting the light beam, the gates swung, the driveway lay bare in a spill of light. "Should I close the gate?" as the red taillights of the coasting Mercedes. Stopped. Fluttering the wing doors. The entrance awakened from darkness with lights greeting, and figures flitted unpacking the car. As I slouched an approach, “Do you want me to shut the gates?” 

"Yes," Peter throws back, lugging bags from the car's trunk after Rita disappeared briefly inside the house. I followed, in a rescue mission for two innocent little boys.

"Take a seat," echoes with a shutting door. as Peter settled down more bags by the kitchen counter. Rita slipped through the back doorway with her two daughters—a few years younger than my boys—ushering them through their last leap to bed. I lingered behind, pulling out a chair at the round table with the widest view of the open L-shaped living area, watching as Peter unpacked food from the fridge and spread it out across the worktop.

Rita joined her husband. With the kettle on the boil, she poured three cups. "Ivan, you don't take milk? No sugar?" 

"That's right." My voice flirted in the air, untethered.

"And how are Lionel and Gavin?" Rita’s question shimmered.

"I haven't seen them yet," my reply drifted on a breeze.  

Peter touched the sore subject—not with the expected magic wand, of a phone call, but with a discourse—"I thought about it. Rita and I discussed it, and there is nothing I can do. Jean will not move. She has proven that before. She even told Rita to get out of her house. It had to do with the letters." 

‘The letters?’—awakening a ploy I didn’t remember. 

“The ones Rita used to hand the boys—quietly, once a week, when she visited.’ Peter voiced. "Jean found out." It sparked a thought when my boys complained, back when we were still a family: “If you ever want to hide something from your mother—tuck it in her wardrobe. Or with her stuff!”

"What about Ronnie?” broke through my thoughts.

“He won't talk to his sister,” Peter echoed. “Ronnie’s wiped his hands off the affair. He doesn't want anything to do with it anymore. He told Jean, ‘It's your life, and you better sort it out.’ Said she was wrong to use the children." 

"What about Jean's mother?" fluttered in my doubt, distanced and fragile. 

Peter’s voice emanated from behind the kitchen counter, busy with snackwiches. "The only one who can still move her," meaning, Jean's mother, “is the old lady herself." If Lionel had to go to his grandmother with the unhappy jam. . . I believe she’d talk seriously to Jean.” 

But! Don't forget,” Peter insisted, “the old lady wiped her hands off paying lawyers. If the old-man were still alive, he’d have let her follow through—that holographic milieu living before me ever since Jean packed her bags with her boys--lawyer hatching cases, folders spread on her lap. Peter sighs, “Jean’s mother—you know how tight she is with her money.” He breathed in another thought. “But! Lionel is her apple's eye. If anyone could get something moving, it’d be him." 

Peter brought his snackwich to the table, and with it, he quietly highlighted the old-lady's indifference toward Gavin. It twisted the knife in my chest. It hurt—knowing Jean preferred Lionel too. The toasts left a few crumbs on the china, as Peter added—outside, Nyx lingered, an eye staring through the crack of the curtain into the light, while Rita stood adrift, free from her mother and wife’s shores. "There is only one solution, then," Peter said. "You need to speak to her." 

Deep inside, I knew he was right. But the deceit—years of it—made the thought unbearable. "I don't want to do that," slips out of my mind, to them both. ‘Talking to Jean?’ creeps, chilling under my skin, infeasible. My heart sagged under the weight of not resolving anything tonight. Then the lion cub in Gavin purred his distant words, crumbling the monster of my ego to rubble. I stepped out of the rubble. "I think you're right, Peter."—"I think. . . I feel it's what Jean wants—to speak with me."

Trailing Peter into the sleeping quarters, behind a side door, the click of a switch lit the Kalamazoo System salesman’s study. He turned away, leaving me behind his desk. I dialed my boys’ house number. Lionel answers—his voice staunch. ‘You deserve to be punished for what's happening with us,’ crossed his mind. And I knew--I’d have to wait. Wait until he grew his senses, maybe into adulthood, and relationship did the talking. I sighed--"Lionel, will you call your mother?"  

Lionel came back on the line, "She doesn't want to talk to you." Through Lionel's doubt, my mind gives that little edge on me—"Just tell your mother, "--“if she wants to solve matters—she better talk to me." 

He couldn’t have said more than two words before Jean's voice sprang to live through the earpiece.

At the labyrinth of open fight tickets and gateways, I linger. Each year, my boys grow a notch—the little one trying to catch up with his brother. Yet, in my heart, they remain just that: the little boys, caught in a thought. And when I stand again at the hub—continent shifting behind me. the past year is still unconsumed. The road ahead across Africa spells one thing: a problem I can’t shy from—not unless I want to see the fool in me.

You are welcome to read all the chapters and explore more at my website: How the Universe Sculptured Our Mind. I spend an absurd amount of time chasing expression—perhaps to shame. But the challenge is mine, updates may occur without notice, shaping the timeline, perceptions. The gift is yours: thoughts, echoes, reflections. I take them with gratitude. And you—who are you, reading these lines, stepping into my genre, my style, the quiet current of my subject?