The Rising Sun.
Chapter 1. The Prologue.
There is always a beginning, even for an event as definitive as an end. It was therefore both appropriate and applicable to Liam's frame of mind, that as he set out early that August morning, fate would probably determine as to whether this would be the last of his life's journeys.
Was there a sense of sadness in this? Perhaps. When mortals attain greater clarity as to the inevitability of said mortality, by definition it is sad. Is there also a sense of
apparent failure in not achieving such a thing as a finality in desires and in hopes? I
don't know. I just seek balm to my soul in the likes of Robert Browning.
"My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched
That after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.
But enough of this depressing line of thinking. Liam was undertaking a new journey, a
fresh adventure at a time when his dotage should have confined him to early nights and
regulated living, wrapped up in an illusion of retirement.
Retirement, my butt. Nearly five months had passed since he had finished the last assignment. Five months in which he had; painted the house, done the garden, put the dog out and brought the cat in, (or is it the other way around?), and sorted out all those papers that needed sorting. He had got, as is termed,"his affairs in order," and now realised that he missed the action. Even a series of trips to foreign climes that he had never visited before, but had promised himself, he recognised for what they were, namely a series of short term fixes.
It was therefore with no hesitation that; when the offer came through to take up a position in Japan for one year, he needed but a fraction of a second to express his affirmation in a barely suffused ardency that would have done credit to a series of Judgement Day hosannas.