This morning it rained, but at four in the afternoon, I left the locked psychiatric ward and walked into the vestiges of day. The sky was grand and mottled with clouds, the pavement luminescent from the storms, the late sunlight making something surreal out of the green stone church at the top of the hill.
Across the cobblestone street from the church, there is a small statue of Force set on a short pillar at the entrance to the park. I have always loved bronze statues of muscled men, all those archetypes, cast down in aloof glory to the spaces of this actual world. Force sits on a lion, and a boy rests at his knee. His hair is fixed into curls, his bulk does not move against the winter wind. He rests his left palm on the boy’s bare shoulder. I long, childlike, for that steady hand.