Jephthah

Jephthah

You need wondering to live in the world. You need the unknown to live. Knowledge is death in many ways. It comes forth with your will to understand, and a single instance is enough to drag you down. In the end, it is of your own making. You are told this, but need to know for yourself. You spend your days in restless pursuit of nights. I know that now, and have come to accept it, because I can rewind my daughter. I can rewind to the moment she leaves the house and closes the door behind her. I have it in full definition. I can see her face clearly, how she turns the key, checks the door, goes on the driveway and becomes a smudge. I have studied the contours of that smudge, I made sure the cameras would be on from the day before. I wanted to see my first burglar, a trespasser, somebody like that in the making, even if it was one of the neighbors. I knew that they were due on my street. I studied the smudge, a gray smudge, stretched to a degree of distinction over a couple of frames I have learned to live with. I wanted to be a better witness to what was out there. I made sure all the wiring was in place. I had an expert come over and my wife made him coffee and he said I had the best system to catch a thief, or look at what was out there, happening right under my nose. I made careful remarks to my wife to impress the expert, and my wife made him another cup because he had to run another check, one last check, before he could get going. The expert's palms were sweaty and he wanted to leave, you could see it from his body language. I told him I'll send him my first catch, and he became less tense and smiled rather broadly because he knew that I wasn't going to do it,

that he was going to leave in a couple of minutes, because those are the kind of things somebody says to you when it's OK to leave, to show you they have plans. He said that there is nothing like the thrill of a first catch, that it buys you the necessary time to be in control of the situation, because, with the kind of thing I have, you can almost tell what's going to happen.