The Pilgrim

People who are accustomed to sufferance have a sheen about them. You can even make it out in the way they talk and carry themselves. It’s as if they have gone to a place that is so far off the edge of human consciousness, that they have borne witness to things that no one else can ever understand….except maybe people who are like them. This I imagine might be why old soldiers never ever talk about war when they gather together. They just seem to embody a strangeness like men looking beyond the present into some distant place that’s so foreign and alien that they’re permeated with the futility of trying to describe it to others.