The Sea Ramble

Peter strolled along the sea front and thought about the indisputable facts; but as the tide swelled and turned he soon lost his metallic edge. Were the set of events laid out in his mind, and the established conclusion of that trajectory, truly facts? Or were permutations possible? Indeed was it not that fiction was the gold in the cracks, giving rich story where nothing lay? He thought about his half sister; whom he had never met and knew very little about; what was she doing, how was she living her life and where? Was she even still alive? Had she ever existed in reality or had the one statement of her existence been a conjuring by his mother – using the fact of her as an emotional weapon against the rosy tinted image of his absent father held in his boyhood mind? He recalled that one time he met his father; the short walk they'd taken across the field in Tuam. His father did not speak until they saw a small group of horses standing by a tree and then he had pointed into the mid distance and exclaimed that it was raining on the other side of the field – and how for a moment they were held in another space and time. Another reality. A charm. And how they had walked back to the family smallholding, silent but for their breathing and then once back his father had pressed a piece of gold into his hand before moving away down the hall. The only thing his father ever gave him. His mind moved on and he thought about the woman in the next street to his whom everyone talked ill of. Joan loved a man called John but John had killed a woman and was serving life in some prison somewhere. Was Joan negating the facts surrounding this man, to use the phrase 'in spite of' or did she not even perceive the facts as truth? What were Joan's set of facts? Peter walked on, muttering in his mind of how the Buddhists say there is no truth.